A new review into public sector food standards has some useful ambitions but is there any prospect of them actually being realised, asks Nick Hughes?
In March, the UK Government commissioned Conservative MP Will Quince to carry out a review into public sector food procurement. “We will ensure our schools, hospitals and armed forces are using their budgets to support sustainable food produced to the high animal welfare standards we have here in Britain, which are some of the best in the world,” trumpeted Defra secretary of state, Steve Barclay, on announcing Quince’s mission.
‘Hooray!’ was the thrust of the response across my social networks among health and sustainability professionals.
To an extent, I share the sentiment. I’ve lost count of the number of reports over the years that, quite rightly, have identified the 1.9 billion meals served in the public sector each year as a key lever ministers can pull to improve the food environment. Politically, too, it should be an easier lever to pull than private sector intervention, given the state acts both as standard setter and customer.
Yet, somehow, the positive mood music around improving public sector food never quite translates into meaningful policy.
Alongside making the system more accessible to small- and medium-sized businesses and farmers, Quince is tasked with exploring opportunities to extend the reach of the government buying standard for food and catering services (GBSF) beyond central government departments to other arms of the state such as schools, hospitals and the armed forces, as well as ensuring better compliance with those standards (current school food standards, for example, are notoriously poorly enforced).
It’s good, sensible stuff; yet it’s also stuff that has been promised before and never delivered. Confusingly, we are still awaiting a government response to proposals to overhaul public sector food and catering policy that were consulted on in 2022 and sought to achieve broadly the same aims as Quince’s own review. They included a target for 50% of public sector food spend to go on food produced locally or certified to higher environmental production standards and for the GBSF to be a requirement across the wider public sector.
Defra says a government response to the original consultation will be published in due course but it does rather beg the question, why commission a new review when the previous one hasn’t yet concluded?
Perhaps this is Barclay’s attempt to break from the past and take personal ownership of the public sector food agenda given that the previous consultation was commissioned by one of his predecessors, George Eustice. Barclay, it should be noted, is also ploughing a new furrow on food labelling, another issue that has been subject to numerous political false starts in recent years.
Yet the cynic in me can’t shift the sense that Quince’s review merely serves to run down the clock until this becomes someone else’s problem. The former Britvic employee will engage with stakeholders across the public sector food and catering supply chain and will also examine international practices. That will take time, and with an election expected in the autumn there seems every chance his findings will never see the light of day, or if they do then the window of parliamentary time available to put his proposals into practice will be impossibly small.
It’s hard to imagine that a future Labour government (as polls suggest is highly probable) would be minded to put the Quince blueprint into practice. The party has its own plan for improving the quality of public sector food procurement, with Sir Keir Starmer having previously pledged that at least 50% of food bought by the public sector would be “locally produced and sustainable” under a Labour government.
Perhaps the existence of cross-party consensus on the need to improve public sector food merits a ‘Hooray!’ of its own. But good intentions have rarely been the issue where public procurement is concerned. You’ll forgive me if I save the balloons and bunting for some concrete political action.
