In the week when the secretary of state, Angela Eagle, advised households to keep buffer stocks of several days’ worth of food and water, the government’s independent watchdog said Defra should do more to strengthen food supply chain resilience to major disruptions. In a new report, the National Audit Office said the department has taken some steps to improve its preparedness in recent years, but has not done enough to engage critical stakeholders, including businesses. In this week’s episode, one of the report’s authors, Rich Sullivan-Jones, joins Nick to talk through the key findings of a report which lands at a time when extreme weather is already putting significant pressure on food supply chains. Rich also provides an update on government work to build a more resilient food system via the national food strategy for England, and considers whether the vital role of the foodservice sector in responding to food shocks is fully understood within government.
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Further reading
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Jack Thompson, editor of TABLE’s Fodder newsletter, explores the context in which food’s latest buzzword is being used and why we need to interrogate what it actually means in practice
Transcript
Nick Hughes: Hello, and welcome to the Small Print, a podcast by Footprint Media Group. I’m Nick Hughes, Footprint’s Editorial director. Each week we delve beneath the headlines of an issue impacting the hospitality and food service sector through our unique lens of environmental and social affairs. In the week when the Secretary of State, Angela Eagle, advised households to keep buffer stocks of several days worth of food and water, the government’s independent watchdog said DEFRA should do more to strengthen food supply chain resilience to major disruptions. In a new report, the National Audit Office said the department has taken some steps to improve its preparedness in recent years, but has not done enough to engage critical stakeholders, including businesses. In this week’s episode, I speak with one of the report’s authors, Rich Sullivan Jones, to talk through the key findings of a report which lands at a time when extreme weather is already putting significant pressure on food supply chains. Rich also provides an update on government work to build a more resilient food system by the National Food Strategy for England, and considers whether the vital role of the food service sector in responding to food shocks is fully understood within government. Rich, welcome to the Small Print. It’s great to have you join me.
Rich Sullivan-Jones: Thanks, Nick. Good to be here.
Nick Hughes: So you’re here to talk about a new National Audit Office report on resilience of the food supply chain to disruptions. Now, I’ve no doubt a lot of Footprint listeners will be familiar with the work of the nao, but I think it’s worth stating for those that aren’t, what is the role that the NAO performs and what is the purpose of these kind of reports?
Rich Sullivan-Jones: Yeah, thanks, Nick. It’s a good. A good point because I think, you know, this. This topic around food resilience is one where there’s a lot of big policy questions. And so I think actually articulating the role of the NAO is quite useful in that context because. So we’re the independent auditors of government, essentially, a large part of our work involves providing Assurance over the financial statements of central government departments and agencies. But the other side of our work that I’m involved in is our value for money work. One of the important parts of our remit is that we don’t comment, we don’t have any sort of judgment on merits of government’s policy objectives. It’s up to officials and ministers to decide what it is that they want to achieve in policy terms and in broad terms how they want to achieve it. What we do look at is the efficiency and effectiveness with which the government bodies are actually delivering those objectives, spending taxpayer money in pursuit of those aims. So that’s where, that’s where our value for money work comes in. Quite interesting, I think in the context of this particular report on food supply chain resilience. You know, ultimately the food supply chain is a private sector, you know, thing with partial involvement from the third sector. But it’s, you know, unlike some areas of government resilience we’ve looked at where there’s a large amount of direct public service delivery going on. This is one where actually, well, the government’s role is actually quite small here for the most part, except when it needs to intervene, where suddenly there’s needs to mobilize. So that changes the equation around. Well actually there’s not a huge amount of public spend here, but the small amount of public spend that is going on can have a really, really big impact on the outcomes for the country.
Nick Hughes: Yes. Okay, great. And that’s important I think, isn’t it? Because this is such a big topic, food resilience. And, and I’m conscious that, you know, we might have listeners screaming at us saying well, why aren’t you talking about self sufficiency or why aren’t you talking about trade policy? But that’s not the purpose of this particular report.
Rich Sullivan-Jones: So although that, that said, you know, there’s still a part of our look and look at the process of policymaking, you know, so, so whether the government would choose to want to formally have a, have an objective, the UK to become more self sufficient with food or to change a trade policy or whatever that might be, that’s up to ministers ultimately and parliament to decide those things. But actually what’s the process of analyzing and assessing and informing that decision making by government departments and that we can look at.
Nick Hughes: Yes, and that’s really important in the context of food resilience, isn’t it? Because it’s not just about throwing money at the problem. It is about that process of analyzing the need and what the response is. Should Be, because as you were saying, this is, you know, the food is, is largely a private sector function of the private sector. It’s not like water, it’s not like power, where there’s strong public sector involvement. So actually quite critical to understand where the role of policymakers and government is within that.
Rich Sullivan-Jones: Indeed. Yes, agree. And indeed, one of the things that we note in our report is, you know, you mentioned things like water and energy is another one. I mean, those are still the private sector, but there’s a much stronger regulatory oversight in terms of the actual delivery of that, that service, of that product than there is in food. You know, safety and standards are regulated by the Food Standards Agency, but the kind of, the food supply itself isn’t really meaningfully regulated. So, yeah, it is a different kind of equation.
Nick Hughes: Yeah. Okay, so give us, Rich, if you can, the one minute headline summary of what the report concluded and then we’ll get into some, some of the details that stood out to me.
Rich Sullivan-Jones: Of course, no problem. Yeah, I’ll, I’ll go with pretty high, short. The short, high level version. There’s, it’s. All of our reports are kind of constrained in terms of length, but this particular one was a big topic and so we had to be quite focused in a way. So. Yeah, right, the short, the short version. So the report looked at DEFRA’s approach to the food supply chain as a whole. So it didn’t look in much detail at any particular aspects of it, but it, you know, included both domestic food production and imported food and covers everything from production through packaging and manufacture, through logistics, distribution, storage, right up to retail and catering. So trying to look at sort of the system as a whole really, and to give a brief flavour of our kind of key, key messages and key conclusions, things to highlight, firstly that the food supply chain has on the whole been quite resilient to disruptions in recent years. You know, there’s the COVID pandemic, war in Ukraine and obviously more recently Middle east, various cyber attacks, particularly last year. For the most part, it hasn’t required significant government intervention to maintain food availability. I mean, there were things government had to do in the pandemic that was perhaps medium sized, let’s say, but not sort of major intervention. And no real, you know, these examples haven’t seriously disrupted our food supply ultimately. But DEFRA considers that the risk of a more severe disruption, while still low likelihood, is increasing. You know, those risks are growing and so it’s taken some actions in response. You know, we report on some of the things it’s done, such as increasing the size, you know, more than doubling the size of its dedicated teams to actually work on this stuff and develop, develop plans to. On how we might respond in future. It’s put more focus into preparing for some of the, some of those more serious events that could occur, such as a national power outage. And it’s been kind of, you know, fully taking part in the Cabinet Office’s home defence program in terms of the geopolitical situation. But we, which is, that’s all positive stuff. We do highlight a few quite key limitations and really our overarching conclusion, I think is that it hasn’t really done enough in recent years to fully engage with businesses, with local communities and with households themselves on kind of building that resilience and preparedness. You know, engagement with industry was good in the pandemic, but it’s reduced since when there’s been less of a kind of pressing emergency at the local level, kind of local resilience forums. These groups of local authorities, they often lack clarity on what’s really expected of them in relation to food. And until recently the government hasn’t prioritised engaging directly with the public on household preparedness, although that is starting to change just this year. So that’s the, in a nutshell, high level finding really. Obviously the report includes a number of other findings and recommendations and we’re happy to be talked about in this conversation.
Nick Hughes: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Great. Yeah. And as you said, it feels like we haven’t. The response, particularly from industry to date has been, has been quite successful actually in dealing with a lot of the issues that have come up, particularly the COVID 19 pandemic as you alluded to there. My sense from reading the report is that DEFRAS approach to food supply chain resilience has been largely reactive rather than preventative, if you like, and you know, reasonably and understandably so and perhaps quite successfully. You touched on the COVID 19 pandemic and really the DEFRA’s role was sort of a coordinating role as much as anything, wasn’t it around bringing together the right, getting the right people in the room through those resilience forums and ensuring different parts of the supply chain were talking to one another. Do you think that’s how they still see their role as sort of a coordinating function rather than more proactive and preventative?
Rich Sullivan-Jones: Yeah, I mean, it’s interesting whether they still see it as primarily a coordinating role, quite possibly. I mean, again, because it’s so private sector led this, this, this supply chain. But in terms of that move from Being reactive to being a bit more preventative. I think there is a bit of a shift in emphasis and I think, you know, we certainly found DEFRA taking this topic very seriously just during our study. It’s one of the most kind of really fully engaged and immersed that I found an audited body when doing one of these BFM audits. So I think there is a bit of that shift in that mindset. But there’s still the question of how do you actually handle that really. And obviously with the pandemic there were more direct interventions that DEFRA took. One of the key ones really being actually distributing itself food packages to households, the vulnerable households that needed to shield and therefore couldn’t under social distancing kind of guidelines, couldn’t get to supermarkets or elsewhere to get food. But you know, there is a reactiveness and, but I don’t think that’s unique to defra. I think government generally, there’s so many crises it needs to deal with, you know, and increasingly so over time there’s just been such a need to respond to whatever the latest emergency is. And we found this a little bit with DEFRA in the past. It’s, you know, we reported a year and a half ago or just over a year ago on resilience to animal diseases. So something else that affects the food supply chain at the, at the kind of the product food production end. And one of the points we made there is that it’s operating model was really predicated on a world where outbreaks of animal diseases were occasional things. So people could, you know, the veterinary staff and specialists can pivot to deal with the outbreak and then go back to the usual kind of work that helps prevent and reduce the impact of future outbreaks. But because outbreaks, particularly of bird flu were happening literally every year and lasting months, well actually that was becoming the norm. And so that, that business as usual stuff that’s really important for the preventative work for the long term, resilience was happening less and less and less. And I think that’s something that, that DEFRA struggles with and I think other governments struggle with as well. How do you get the right balance when there’s always some problem to deal with?
Nick Hughes: Absolutely. And you know, we need to be clear that we’re dealing with a wide range of risks where the food supply chain is concerned. You list some of them in the, in the report itself. You’ve got acute risks, things like extreme weather, cyber attacks, energy disruptions. And then you’ve got your longer term chronic risks, which would be things like climate change. And obviously we’re seeing these risks manifest themselves right now. Climate change, you know, the summer, the impact on farmers of the heat waves and the drought. We’ve had cyber attacks over the past 18 months on major retailers. I know we’ve had cyber attacks further down the chain as well. These gaps haven’t made it into the public domain. Do you think that the nature of these risks and, and their interconnectedness is now, is it well understood within government, do you think?
Rich Sullivan-Jones: I mean, certainly that’s one, one of the areas where I think our findings in this, in this study were pretty positive in terms of DEFRA’S understanding of that risk landscape. Yeah. For the risks themselves at least. You know, we, we, we certainly didn’t find any areas where, you know, there was a particular risk or some of that, as you described, some of that interconnectedness, you know, what’s the impact on climate change on, you know, the kind of that long term, chronic risk, what’s the impact of that on some of those short term acute risks, A particular incident of wildfires or floods or whatever it might be? We didn’t find any kind of gaps really. And it’s, it’s sort of awareness and understanding of those things where there were some gaps in its sort of, it’s full, the full picture that DEFRA has is more what are some of the bits of the supply chain that are quite crucial and how do these risks affect those bits of the supply chain? And you know, one of the examples that we noted in our reports, and I know you’ve had Phil from the Cold Chain Federation on a previous episode of this podcast, but it is the cold chain and it’s, you know, one of those kind of potential bottlenecks in the supply chain that can really have a big impact if it were to fall over. And so how do certain risks, like a power outage particularly affect that part of the supply chain? And then how would that risk then follow on in terms of impacts? So that’s where I think we pushed DEFRA a little bit to develop its understanding further.
Nick Hughes: Yes. Yeah. It was notable that you found no specific food supply chain assets are currently included in the government’s database of critical national infrastructure assets. Now, actually, we should probably start by saying that food is one of the 13 sectors designated as critical national infrastructure. Do you want to just explain briefly, Rich, what having that status means in practice and what kind of privileges does it confer on those sectors?
Rich Sullivan-Jones: Yeah, so I mean, critical national infrastructure, cni, it basically means this is a sector or Some sort of set of infrastructure that’s essential to the functioning of the country and sort of security of the country. A lot of the other ones are, you know, energy, water, healthcare, kind of government, public services, generally road and transport, you know, essential essential infrastructure, essentially. Food is one of those. What does that mean in practice? Well, so as well as, you know, DEFRA is the lead government department responsible for this sector, but it doesn’t do it alone. So the Cabinet Office has a kind of coordinating role when it comes to CNI sectors and also separately when it comes to sort of the biggest risks facing the country and facing government. And Italy has slightly different processes for these things. And you mentioned earlier as well about the number of different kind of interconnected risks that can affect food supply. You know, the Cabinet Office publishes on behalf of government as a whole, the National Risk Register, and that’s underpinned by a kind of unpublished national security risk, national security risk assessment. And that sets out what are the biggest risks affecting the country. But those are kind of discrete events. The way that’s cut to sort of discrete events, there’s a whole governance around that. But then for the CNI sectors, it’s a slightly different governance, but it does exist still. It is there. And that’s more to say, well, these are important sectors that could be affected by a range of different risks and food really is one of those that’s quite multifaceted and the, the nature of those risks and how they could affect food supply. So it is quite complex. But that’s, that’s where some of that wider governance come in, comes in. Cabinet Office has this role to kind of assess capability of DEFRA and its, and its arms and bodies in terms of how it oversees this, this area. But you, yes, you asked also about the kind of, you know, the fact that there were no specific assets recorded on this.
Nick Hughes: Yes.
Rich Sullivan-Jones: Knowledge base sort of toolkit that is managed by Cabinet Office, but it’s a cross government database, basically. And I think it is because for a lot of these things, you know, the sorts of assets we’re talking about are really big things where there’s a small number of them, you know, reservoirs or particular bits of rail or road network or major bridges, you know, where it’s. You can point to a small number of very specific things that have a huge impact. I think the issue with the food sector, and possibly part of the reason it hasn’t in the past put anything onto this database is because it’s a very large, huge number of quite small, individually small assets, you know, an individual warehouse or cold chain network, whatever it might be. And so that’s why it’s sort of held back from really using it in that way in the past. But Defra, you know, during the course of our study was starting to change its thinking about this and start to say, well, actually what could we put in there? Either identifying individual assets or potentially groups of assets, you know, but to put them in as a group, be able to say, well, actually this is the tool through which we identify what are the most essential bits, the most risky, impactful bits of infrastructure within the CNI sector that we need to kind of prioritize and protect if something goes wrong. Is starting to change the thinking on that now.
Nick Hughes: And yes, so just to return to the cold chain example, what that looks like in practice, I guess is knowing where those, I think there’s about 400 cold chain warehouses distributed around the UK. It’s sort of knowing where those are, what their capacity is as well at any given time. Because one of the, one of the points that the, the report makes is about how this, I guess the supply chain has been built over many years for efficiency.
Rich Sullivan-Jones: Yes.
Nick Hughes: And has done, you know, in many ways an excellent job of being extremely efficient in a way that keeps costs down and make sure that shells are stopped 99% of the time. But that efficiency and sort of constant level of concentration does leave it potentially more vulnerable to disruption. And I just wonder whether you feel that the lack of redundancy in the system because it’s such a tight system, such a fine tuned machine is now understood as a potential weakness by government and industry, actually, or actually, are we still pursuing ever greater efficiency as the guiding principle of food policy and strategy?
Rich Sullivan-Jones: So I don’t get the sense that the, you know, we’re continuing as a country and as a government continuing to push the efficiency as the primary guiding principle. And you know, and I don’t know that it was never, it was always a specific, deliberate guiding principle, but I think, and this, you know, goes beyond food as well to all sorts of other, you know, all sorts of other sectors of the economy. There has been a push for efficiency and a general trend in that direction that does bring prices lower ultimately. It keeps, you know, costs lower and therefore prices lower for consumers and households. But it does, you know, certainly the kind of conversations that we had with defra, with other stakeholders, with other parts of government, we didn’t get the sense that that’s still the priority. I mean, of course you want to do things efficiently. That’s absolutely right. We should, but that, you know, there’s, I think over, over several years there’s been a growing awareness of the vulnerability that that can potentially expose you to. And therefore what are the different ways that we might still try and be efficient? And rightly so, but also how do we build more protection around that potentially? And there’s different ways that you can do that. And again, you know, the NEO is not going to come in with specific policy preferences. You know, should there be more stockpiling either by industry? And that’s something that could be achieved through encouragement, engagement, through regulatory requirements. Government can choose to invest directly in some of the stuff some countries have done, some of that sort of thing. You know, actually, is stockpiling in all cases the right way to approach it? Can there be further diversification of where we get food from? Do we prioritize our own directed production more? And how do we, how do we get that balance right? How do we make our own farming more productive? You know, there’s different ways of approaching these things. It’s up to government to decide what the right balance is. But it, you know, it needs to be thought through and a deliberate choice. And that’s where I think we haven’t always been in recent years.
Nick Hughes: Yes, absolutely, yeah. And the report does include some examples of countries where the decision has been taken to do some strategic stockpiling or build the capacity for stockpiling, at the very least of some essential goods. But as you say, that’s a sort of strategic question for ministers to answer.
Rich Sullivan-Jones: But to this point we discussed at the start though, what we often see in all areas of government is sometimes a bit of an assumption that, well, that country’s doing it, but our country’s different and we didn’t get that as a defence from defra. You know, DEFRA actually were quite open here. But that’s kind of a point that’s often raised in other parts of government. But we always want that government departments to be thinking about, well, okay, but is there something we can learn from here? Can we actually assess what it would cost to do this, what the impacts would be, what the benefits would be, what the downsides would be and actually kind of examine how well would this work and what would, you know, inform those ministerial decisions? That’s what DEFRA hasn’t really done in the past. It’s, you know, done a sort of high level review of some of these things, but hasn’t really explored properly how might these work and what would the cost benefits be. So that’s one of our recommendations to actually do this properly and actually give some useful evidence and analysis to your senior officials, to your ministers to offer some options for how they might want to approach this.
Nick Hughes: Yes. And I wonder whether that potential openness to learn from what other countries are doing is relevant to the question around public engagement. Sean, emergency preparedness. Because you know, I know you have read the National Preparedness Commission report last year that Tim Lang produced.
Rich Sullivan-Jones: Indeed, yeah.
Nick Hughes: In which he felt that the UK is well behind other countries in this area. Now just in the past week we’ve had the Secretary of State Angela Eagle recommend people take some steps to stockpile some food if they were able to in response to particularly the growing threat from extreme weather and linked to the this El Nino effect that that is coming, albeit people’s ability to actually do that in practice is perhaps taken for granted sometimes. But it’s clearly on ministers radars now, isn’t it? How do you feel the government can better engage with households on food resilience?
Rich Sullivan-Jones: I mean I think it is that clearer, more transparent messaging and even during the course of our study that was starting to change. So it’s not just know the DEFRAUD hasn’t just suddenly come out and come out with it out of the blue. It was, it has been starting to change that kind of willingness to be a bit more open and direct with the public within DEFRA and within Cabinet Office, I think. Was it last year possibly Cabinet Office launched a website called Prepare, which is supposed to be about preparedness, household preparedness for emergencies. But it kind of launched with not a lot of fanfare and there was a lot of other global crises to be dealing with at the time. And so it didn’t, it didn’t really get much true traction. But as we note in our, in our report there is an intention to sort of relaunch expanded and upgraded version of that. DEFRA is kind of starting to contribute to the food rating aspects of that and we’ve encouraged to really make the most of that opportunity. But you know the fact that ministers directly are starting to say some of these things now and that is good but it’s, you know, of course there’s a, there’s an understandable hesitation to not want to cause panic and that’s right, we don’t want to cause panic because then you end up with panic buying and there’s this COVID pandemic situation again. But to be open, honest and for those who can afford and have space to store some long life foods in there, in their home, encouraging people to do that. And I think the point, the way we put it in our report, is if a large proportion of households have three to four days worth of food that in an emergency they can use to get by, that allows the supply chain and the government, if something happens to mobilise, to start getting things moving again, to prioritise those who genuinely are not in a position to do that. It just helps everyone kind of smooth over those really difficult periods. So I think getting some of those messages out, and not just the idea of it in principle, but actually the how so, how many days worth, what kind of foods store well and can be, you know, there’s a power outage. What kind of foods do you not need to cook in a heated, you know, or do people also store little kind of gas powered stoves or whatever, you know. So it’s, it’s the advice on actually how to do it in practice that I think will be most useful.
Nick Hughes: In a little over a week’s time, Hundreds of the UK’s leading food service and hospitality professionals will descend on Barnesgrove Farm in Hampshire to tackle the biggest challenges and opportunities facing our industry. Footprint Festival takes place across the 17th and 18th of September and features more than 130 speakers across five stages. Those attending will hear from influential thinkers including Sir Charles Godfrey on future proofing hospitality, Minette Batters on Farming’s Future, Douglas McMaster on Waste Free cooking and Hugh Fearnley Whittenstall on fiver. The Footprint Festival is so much more than a hub for conversation with workshops, exhibitions, demonstrations, networking and entertainment. You’ll leave with fresh ideas, valuable new connections and the energy to help shape what’s next for our sector. Barnesgrove has a fixed capacity and there are just a few tickets remaining. Secure your space now by visiting footprintfestival.com if we zoom back out again. Rich. One of the other big vehicles for government and DEFRA to trying to deliver strategic improvements in food security and resilience is via the UK Government Food Strategy for England. So this document, this is the Good Food Cycle document that was published in July last year and that was very much a sort of diagnosis of the challenges facing the food system. There has been some frustration among food industry stakeholders over the lack of updates on how the government plans to actually achieve those 10 priority outcomes that it set out in the strategy within which the ambition to build a more resilient food system features within those. What can you tell us through your engagement with DEFRA about the work going on behind the scenes, perhaps to create plans for delivering those outcomes and indicators against which to measure progress. Because it feels like this is a really important document actually in, in terms of thinking about our future food resilience and security.
Rich Sullivan-Jones: It is. And I think, you know, I mean, it’s interesting because there was, when it was launched, it was called that, the title had strategy in the name, but it didn’t have all the features that we would expect to see in a full fledged strategy. I think DEFRA recognizes that, you know, it’s, it’s a clear strategic vision, it’s a clear articulation of where, where we want to get to, but how do we get there? It’s light on the detail. We do know that DEFRA is working to develop that further and that also doesn’t apply only to food security, you know, since, since the publication of that, there’s been a new Permanent Secretary at defra, obviously another change of government in that time as well. And I think we definitely do see more, more proactive sort of engagement with this idea of you can’t have a broad vision, you need to really translate this into plans and, and clear actions. We saw this with the refresh of the Environmental Improvement Plan towards the end of last year, where actually it was quite well received by stakeholders for that particular area of DEFRA’s work, because it was just much clearer about actually what are linking through, what’s the thing we’re trying to achieve and what are we doing to get there and what are the metrics to measure it. You know, what DEFRA is working on is trying to do that sort of take that sort of mentality and approach to all the different outcomes that it’s trying to deliver, one of which is food security and food resilience. So there’s this stuff going on that underpins that thinking and that work. Now, whether we then see a specific updated document or new, new publication, that’s essentially, that was our clear strategic vision. Now here’s the full strategy and plan. I don’t know what, how that will look when it, when it’s eventually completed, but, but that is the sort of thinking that’s going on in defraud. And genuinely it’s something that, you know, we’ve seen as a very positive development and how it’s approaching because these, these sorts of issues, because a lot of, you know, not just in food, but across all the different areas it’s responsible for a lot of what it does is complex and affected by all sorts of other things. And so actually getting into that, how we can deliver these complex outcomes is really Important and that that is the direction that we’re seeing defrauding in.
Nick Hughes: Yeah, absolutely. And complex. And also of course, cross departmental as well. I mean a lot of the ambitions in the, in the food strategy will, will span the responsibilities of Department of Health Department for Education Department for, you know, all energy and all kinds of different departments. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it’s one thing we know about food is how it just touches so many different government departments and agencies. And that coordination piece is often challenging and can sometimes be missing. Rich, I just want to pick up on one other thing you said in your summary of the key conclusions which was around communication with the industry. And, and, and I just wonder, well, firstly, what did you feel was missing in the way that DEFRA currently communicates with industry? And then I’d like to ask you specifically about the food service sector, but perhaps on that first point, what, what do you feel could be done better in terms of industry engagement and communication?
Rich Sullivan-Jones: Yeah, there’s a couple of things and I think, you know, you asked earlier about defra. Is DEFRA reactive as opposed to kind of more proactive and preventative? You know, we got really positive feedback from a range of industry stakeholders on the way DEFRA engaged during the pandemic. But that’s because there was a pressing emergency and something that had to be addressed there and then. And that level of engagement and support for some of these groups that DEFRA set up has reduced since. So one of the things I think is having more of that routine regular engagement during what you might call peacetime, so that issues are spotted earlier and there’s kind of this more integrated approach ongoing rather than just in a crisis. So that’s one. The other thing that we note in our report as well is around the extent to which industry’s actually being kind of consulted and involved in developing the response plans. You know, the response plan is ultimately going to rely on the private sector. And so how do you know if it’s going to work if you don’t discuss it with them as part of developing the plans and also testing through, you know, scenario exercises. So in the web generally is very supportive of using it. Using, exercising to, to test kind of response plans and resilience issues. But again, you know, actually involving food businesses hasn’t really happened other than some quite low level things around cyber attacks. So it’s, you know, these are some of the key areas that I think we’ve really encouraged DEFRA to take further. Yeah, you asked about also food service and.
Nick Hughes: Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess I’m interested in whether you feel to what extent large public sector caterers in particular, but also sort of the big high street hospitality businesses, pub and restaurant groups, et cetera, are engaged in resilience planning by defra. Because my own impression is that officials tend to default to the big supermarkets and manufacturers when engaging with the food industry. I’ve certainly had exchanges with DEFRA press offices in the past where it’s apparent they don’t really know what a food service business does. So I just wonder whether to what extent you feel that part of the sector is recognized and seen by DEFER officials. And is there a case for stronger engagement with that particular part of the sector, particularly with the public sector caterers? Because, you know, if we’re thinking about response to food crises and resilience planning, the guys supplying schools, hospitals, prisons, all these institutions are going to be absolutely critical to the response.
Rich Sullivan-Jones: Absolutely. And we have some brief mentions in our report of that kind of catering end of the, of the supply chain, as you know, in addition to. To retail and households receiving things directly and also some of the impacts that the COVID pandemic in particular had on, on the food service and hospitality sectors. I mean, it’s a good question about the extent to which they’re fully, you know, they’re as engaged with defra, you know, DEFRA engages with them as much as with the sort of, the, the direct households, if you like, kind of retail and of things. Yeah, I don’t know that we have a strong sense of the extent to which that is the case, but it’s something that I don’t, you know, I think we would say shouldn’t be missed out partly because, as you say, part of this, part of that sector supplies schools, hospitals, prisons and so on. But another thing that I think came up through the course of our work, we didn’t really report on it directly, but it was this idea of does defraud make enough kind of proactive use of existing networks? If there’s a crisis, there’s an emergency of some kind, a severe disruption, does it make enough use of existing networks? And people have talked about the fact that during the pandemic, the food charity sector sort of stepped up and provided quite a lot of help because they did have existing networks, but that was kind of off the sector’s back and it relied on quite a lot of goodwill rather than as part of deficit response plans. And it might be that actually with a more severe disruption, is there a role for the hospitality sector to say, well, actually we have a large amount of food, we can’t make full use of it because of whatever this crisis is. That’s meaning we can’t run our business as we normally would. How can we support. And so that’s also an interesting question that would be worth defra exploring is actually the full supply chain and all the different components of it. How do we make best use of that? And what, what kinds of emergencies would lend themselves. Well, to having that more direct involvement?
Nick Hughes: Yeah, absolutely. Well, it perhaps comes back to this sort of mapping piece as well, doesn’t it? We talked about earlier in the context of the cold chain, just understanding how the system works and where the critical assets exist and where capacity, you know, exists. It’s, it’s, it’s not easily done because like you said, it’s such a vast, complex web, that food system. But, but important work nonetheless. Rich look, thank you very much for guiding us through the key conclusions from a really important report, I think, and really timely as well, because we’re seeing this coalescence of risks hitting food supply chains. And I think the answer to that question, how do we ensure future food resilience? Is a question that all of us involved in the food sector should be asking, not just government departments, but businesses and the third sector organizations and journalists as well, frankly. So thank you very much for taking the time to join us on the Small Print.
Rich Sullivan-Jones: My pleasure. Thank you.
Nick Hughes: We’ll be back next week with another episode of the Small Print. If you like what you’ve heard, please take a moment to rate, share and subscribe.
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