Public Accounts Committee

Oral evidence: Resilience of the UK’s food supply to disruptions, HC 717

Monday 12 October 2026

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 12 October 2026.

Watch the meeting

Members present: Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Chair); Mr Clive Betts; Rachel Gilmour; Rupert Lowe; Blake Stephenson; Matt Turmaine.

Gareth Davies, Comptroller and Auditor General, National Audit Office, Rich Sullivan-Jones, Director, National Audit Office, and Marnya Jain, Alternate Treasury Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, were in attendance.

Questions 1-60

Witnesses

I: Harry Metcalfe, Farmer and YouTuber (Harry’s Farm), Oxfordshire, Jim Bligh, Corporate Affairs Director, British Retail Consortium, and Balwinder Dhoot, Director of Sustainability and Growth, Food and Drink Federation.

II: Professor Neil Ward, Professor of Rural and Regional Development, University of East Anglia, and Professor Tim Lang, Emeritus Professor of Food Policy, City University London’s Centre for Food Policy.

Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General

Resilience of the food supply chain to disruptions (HC 587)

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Jim Bligh, Balwinder Dhoot and Harry Metcalfe.

Chair: Welcome to the Public Accounts Committee on Monday 12 October 2026. Today marks the start of our farming week, in which we take the unusual step of dedicating two separate evidence sessions to examining the resilience of the UK’s food supply to disruption, in order to highlight the significance of the issue.

Disruptions to the food supply chain can have a significant impact on consumers, businesses and Government. Overall, food availability has been maintained in the UK food supply chain during recent disruptions, such as the covid-19 pandemic, and the wars in Iran and Ukraine, but the risks are increasing. Today’s sitting is split between two panels, comprising a cast of witnesses with a huge wealth of knowledge and experience of working in this area. On Thursday, we will hear from senior Government officials about the Government’s point of view on the issue.

This afternoon, we look to hear from our witnesses on a variety of topics, including the Government’s ability to maintain our food supply, the preparedness of the farming sector for major disruption, and the Government’s engagement with food retailers, manufacturers and farmers about food supply resilience. I will now do my usual and ask each of you please to introduce yourselves briefly and perhaps to say what your history is on this subject. Jim, will you start by introducing yourself, please?

Jim Bligh: I am Jim Bligh. I am director of corporate affairs and food policy at the British Retail Consortium. Before joining the BRC in January, I worked for the Food and Drink Federation and before that for PepsiCo, so I have a range of experience in the food industry.

Chair: Good to have you, thank you very much for coming. Harry, of course, we all know you—you may not know us, but we know you.

Harry Metcalfe: I am very grateful to be here, Chair. My background: agriculture college, 1981 came out of there; grain buyer, but wanted to get into farming; started in farming in my own right in 1984, first harvest ’85; and it has gone from there. Currently, I have a farm in the Cotswolds, 300 acres, 120 acres rented, and I am next door to Mr Clarkson, whom you might also know in the Cotswolds.

Chair: Thank you very much, Harry. Bal, please.

Balwinder Dhoot: I am Bal Dhoot. I am the director for sustainability and growth at the Food and Drink Federation. I have been there for three and a half years. Before that, I was a civil servant in DEFRA, where I worked on some previous crises and shocks to hit the food system.

Q1             Chair: Thank you very much. I will start with the first question, but before I do, I should declare an interest as a practising farmer and as a chartered surveyor. Everyone take that into account when I ask my questions. My first question is, I think, to all three of you. What are the biggest challenges that farmers currently face?

Jim Bligh: Thank you for the question, and for the excellent Report from the Auditor General’s team at the NAO, which sets the scene really well. Resilience is absolutely critical to retailers. A resilient supply chain is what we require to be able to operate all around the UK. The vast majority of the food that we sell through retail is produced in the UK, but too much of that comes in as imports from overseas, and all of us as retailers have a priority to increase domestic production.

Clearly, there are challenges for farmers, for manufacturers and for us. We have been through a number of shocks over the years, and the NAO Report identifies them very well. They range from covid to Ukraine, the Iran crisis this year and the ensuing problems with fuel, fertiliser, diesel, and so on. What they show is that we have a remarkably resilient system but that that system, as the NAO says, is reliant on the private sector to be able to co-ordinate itself and to move at the right pace so that we do not end up with, for example, a lack of availability in stores and empty shelves, which for us are a mark of serious failure.

There are probably five groups of risks. I won’t go into too much detail in this answer, but they are climate; energy and water; cyber-security; regulation and Government policy and the constant chopping and changing there; and the geopolitical and trade risks that we all face as well. But specifically on your question about farmers, Mr Chairman, what is abundantly clear to us is that farmers are struggling to get planning permission—struggling to be able to put in, for example, above-ground reservoirs, which should then be able to water field-grade crops. Every farmer I talk to says, “We can’t get the approvals from Government quickly enough,” or, “We’re restricted from being able to put a reservoir on our land.”

At the same time, energy costs have gone up enormously. If you are in protected horticulture or in poultry, it is extremely difficult to fund the energy costs, given where they are. Given that food is a critical national infrastructure industry, it is surprising that Government have not taken any steps on energy to reduce costs for those particular industries, whereas it has for other industries around the place. Answering specifically on farmers, I think those things are among the challenges.

For us as retailers, our tax cost has gone up by 20% in the last two years—since the 2024 Budget. We now pay an effective tax rate of 73.5%. The increase in costs is from employment costs, business rates, packaging costs—the full range. It is about £8 billion a year since the election. If there is one thing that worries us about resilience, it is the huge costs that have been piled into the system since 2024—and, to be fair, in the years before that as well, but this has been particularly pronounced recently. It limits our capacity to invest and the capacity of the system to make money; and ultimately, profit is a good thing. Profit in the food system is the only way we will create the investment and the conditions to grow and to change, given all the circumstances that we face and those risks that we face.

Q2             Chair: Thank you very much; that is a really good opening statement from you.

I will now go to Harry for the farming point of view. Farmers have had a pretty difficult year with the drought.

Harry Metcalfe: Well, you say that. Farming is interesting because it is so variable. The definition of a farmer is a food producer, but you can go from a chicken farm to a pig farm, a Lakeland sheep farmer, a Scottish farmer or my sector, which is arable farming mainly—that is more concentrated in southern England. We have all had certain struggles in different ways, but if you are asking me about our ability to maintain our food supply while keeping food affordable, the challenge right now is this. As an arable farmer, I have had four of the five worst harvests since 2020, and 2026 is the smallest harvest of all since records began—people started keeping records in 1984, when I started farming. The frustration from a farming point of view is that the small harvest is all down to climate change, or climate events, as you would term it. We have had it go from flooding to then not being able to establish a good crop and then get to harvest. This year, for example, it was like someone pressed a switch at the end of June and it just went out. You thought it was going to be a really good harvest and you put the combine in—and it’s not there. So the challenge at the moment for farming in my area is, “What on earth is happening? How can I still grow food? Do I have to grow earlier crops or something to take advantage of the climate change that we’ve got?”

I ought to just mention here that the Scottish farms have done really well this year, because they did not suffer that extreme climate; they have had a good year. The only dilemma I have in talking on farming is that it does vary, depending on where in the country you are growing food.

Q3             Chair: I have just come back from the north of Scotland—I have never seen so much grass in all my life. Mind you, they were still trying to harvest oats in October, so there is always a downside.

Harry Metcalfe: Yes, they are very keen on their grain dryers up in Scotland, but then in the Lake district, they have had a fantastic year.

Q4             Chair: Indeed. Bal?

Balwinder Dhoot: I agree with a lot of what Jim has said about how the sector has been incredibly resilient over the last six or seven years. It has been through some exceptional shocks. Our sector is very reliant on farming. They produce the ingredients that go into our products, and we are a massive customer for domestically produced agricultural production. Having talked about those shocks that have played out over the last seven or eight years, my concern would be, “Would we manage them the same over the next seven or eight years?” I see resilience around domestic production slowly being eroded. It is a bit like a slow puncture, in some ways.

We published some trade data recently, which showed that in the first half of this year, the gap between our imports and exports was one of the highest it has been in the last 25 years. That is not an exception. That is a trend that has been happening over the last decade. If you look into that, I think it suggests that production is moving overseas more. That could be because people are sourcing more. It could be from overseas for their inputs here. It could be because factories are being relocated overseas. When a factory relocates, it is not going to be buying British produce; it is going to buy produce from the country where the factory is. It is kind of a signal around what is happening. At the moment, it is probably manageable. The question is: if that trend continues for the next five to 10 years, would we be able to manage the shocks that the food system has experienced in the same way that we have got through the last six or seven years?

Q5             Chair: What is the answer to that question?

Balwinder Dhoot: I think it would be a lot more challenging. The other thing I would add is that we know there will be more volatility and more shocks. We consider what we have experienced in the last six or seven years to be the new normal, whether it is geopolitics, climate or other events. We should be preparing for the same again, if not worse. We should be thinking about that long-term resilience piece. It is important to think about how we react to specific shocks in the moment or prepare for those, but long-term resilience is the key.

Q6             Chair: Would you like to give us any specific examples of how you think we could increase our resilience?

Balwinder Dhoot: Resilience comes down to investment. In the same way that Jim talked about being able to make profit, if you cannot make money in this country, you will stop farming, you will move your factory and so on. How do you have a system that gets the market to invest in production, but also in the things around resilience, such as stronger supply chains, de-risking energy costs and cyber-security? All those things require investment. How do we have a system that allows and encourages that investment? Alternatively, you can have a system that encourages you to import or shift production overseas. I would add that we are not anti-trade. Having a mix of domestic production and trade is really important for food security. The question is the balance, and the trend is signalling where we are heading, which could become problematic over the next decade.

Q7             Chair: I will hand over to Rupert Lowe in a minute, but Harry, from your point of view, not only do you have resilience in the farming field, but you have to look at resilience in the food chain. Have you any suggestions for us, looking forward five or 10 years, about what we ought to be doing?

Harry Metcalfe: My concerns with the food chain are really about whether they understand how we farm, how we have to take a risk on putting a crop in a ground, and this long-term wait until we can actually give them what they have requested. For an arable farm, I have already committed my 2027 harvest. I know precisely what I am harvesting. It is all in the ground. I have already incurred 74% of the cost. There is nothing I can do once it is fixed. I am then reliant on the weather to behave and can then supply to the food chain. Right now, growing food seems to be an incredibly risky business. I am not sure what we do to encourage me to grow more food at the moment, because currently, it is very high risk—that is proven by the fact that four of the worst harvests have happened since 2020. Why would I continue to grow food when it is such a high-risk activity?

I am also doing it on the back of those four harvests. As I said in a recent video, 2025 was my worst harvest since 1984, by a country mile, so although ’26 was okay, all it actually did was make up what I lost in 2025. I need ’27 to come along before I can put investment into the farm, or into anything. Cash flow is a disaster for farms in my region. The challenge for cereal-growing farmers at the moment is cash flow—they just have not got the cash. What I have learnt recently is that the withdrawal of the basic payment scheme has exposed all farmers to the realities of trying to farm at world prices. That has been a real wake-up call for some, especially when you throw a weather wobbly into it as well. That is the real challenge. As I say, livestock farming and Scotland have not suffered this, as it is regional in this country, but a very big region of the UK has suffered this year.

Q8             Chair: You already mentioned the SFI debacle a week ago. Is there anything more the Government can do—not necessarily monetarily, but in terms of longer-term pronouncements—to give you some confidence that what you have done in planting those crops will actually produce a result?

Harry Metcalfe: As far as I know, the Government cannot control the weather, so they cannot really control the big lever for what the yield will be. I am sure we will come on to SFI and the schemes that are currently there. I am a bit of a fan of those, but none of them actually encourages me to grow food at the moment. That is what I would love to see come out of the debate this week: how will DEFRA encourage me to grow food in the very high-risk environment we have at the moment? To be perfectly honest, I do not have the answer, but I do know that taking away the safety cushion of the area payments has exposed farmers to the reality.

I am also very concerned about the tenanted sector of farming. If you have cash-flow struggles, the last thing you can afford is next year’s rent for your landlords. I can see that being a major challenge. I am also a British taxpayer, as I have other businesses, so I do not want to see money being wasted in terms of how we pay our taxes and where they should go, but food security is a really big one and we ought to be concerned. Right now, as a farmer, I am doing everything I can to not grow food. That is just wrong.

Q9             Chair: That is very helpful. Jim, before I bring Rupert Lowe in, do you have any thoughts, five or 10 years out, about what we should concentrate on with the food supply chain?

Jim Bligh: The first thing, reflecting on where Harry and Bal are as well, is long-term investments. We are seeing a lot more supermarkets having long-term partnerships with farmers and manufacturers. Those enable them to weather the storm, as it were, to create the long-term conditions to invest. If we are asking for tens of millions of pounds of investment in new agricultural machinery or new infrastructure on a farm, there has to be some kind of payback over a period of time. That means that you have to guarantee to farmers that the financing will be there over a long time for stability.

As industry and as the major buyers, we can do quite a lot of that—the challenge comes with Government. I will not make a political point, but we are now on our third Environment Secretary since the last election. I have lost count of the number of discussions I have had about food strategies and cycles—honestly, I am a little lost as to what the strategy in the Department is. Then there is the question of policy priorities. Farmers, manufacturers and retailers are in the middle of a global storm. The Government are saying, “You’ve got to fix the roof,” but the sun is not shining. How do we do that in a way that is affordable, enables us to meet our goals, and supports farmers and manufacturers to adapt and be resilient? It is really tricky.

In terms of what the ask is, we can provide long-term investment against a long-term, certain backdrop, but that means the Department needs to provide a clearer steer on what its long-term strategy is. Risk mitigation for the big buckets of risk that we face needs to fit in as part of that: if the climate goes one particular way or we have serious cyber-security incidents, how will we respond to that in practice? That is where the Department has not provided adequate clarity yet and it could be a lot more strategic about how it does that in the decades to come. We know this storm is going to continue; it will not get easier.

Chair: Thank you for all your opening remarks.

Q10        Rupert Lowe: I should disclose that I have an 865 acre farm in the Cotswolds where, like you, Harry, we farm arable land and we have some sheep.

I take your point about the variability of farming across the country, but that has always been the case. Very often up north they cannot harvest their crops because they get too much rain and even the dryers cannot cope with wheat at 25%.

As to what concerns me, it was quite instructive that paragraph 10 of the NAO Report said DEFRA is “less confident about the ability of businesses” in the food supply chain “to withstand shocks without government intervention in the next five to 10 years.” Frankly, the last thing we need is Government intervention, but why do they need to say that? The answer is that they have created that situation: we watched them increase taxes on employment; taxes are about to come in with this UK carbon border adjustment mechanism, which is going to put another tax on fertiliser; and the net zero agenda means that energy is more expensive than in any other country in the world. They basically are doing absolutely everything in their power to dissuade people, to Harry’s point, from planting crops.

I am fortunate that I do not have any debt, but like you, Harry, when you drill crops, pay 700 quid a tonne for nitrogen and have expensive wheat seed, you are effectively drilling your grain into the ground knowing that you are going to make a loss. You are effectively speculating on two things: No. 1 is that the price is going to go up, and No. 2 is that we are not going to get a catastrophic harvest like we did this year, last year and the year before.

On an overcrowded island, I think we should be prioritising growing crops and feeding ourselves. We account for a relatively low percentage of our food. With rewilding and all the other sorts of schemes—I have recently stopped development on grade 1 arable land in my Great Yarmouth constituency—the Government are doing everything they can to score an own goal and then wondering why farmers are going bust and the supply chain is falling apart.

Chair: We have got quite a lot—

Rupert Lowe: The question we have got to ask ourselves is, is DEFRA equipped to make the long-term plan that farming needs to deliver for the country? That is the question I want to ask all of you.

Harry Metcalfe: Farming is a long-term strategy when you go into it, and food production is at the heart of farming. That is what we are here for, that is what the land is there for, and we enjoy doing it. It is the risk element that has been introduced. I have farmed for 40 years, but it has only got a bit weird in the last five or six years. It was not quite as bad; you had the occasional shock, but something has happened.

I will just drag this point out: when I started as a grain buyer, there was something called intervention. Intervention was an EU scheme that put a minimum price on grain. In 1984-85, in November I would pay the farmer £117.82 for wheat delivered. That is about £110 ex-farm, or something like that. If I put that into the Bank of England calculator, that puts the price of wheat today at £360 to £400 a tonne, depending on which calculator you use. We were around the £180 mark, but since it has become more widely known that we have had a very bad harvest in Europe, it has moved to the right side over £200. But it is a long way adrift from where inflation should take us. That is the challenge: why has that global grain price not moved up with just inflation? Normally, supply and demand sorts this out, but when you have grain traders in Chicago or somewhere setting the price in the UK, we are this little patch and we may have suffered a bad climate while there has been a good harvest in the southern hemisphere or something. I do not know what we will do, but somehow we need to protect the farmers when this situation occurs and we have a really bad harvest. Europe is wrestling with this as well, because it cannot afford the agricultural budget either.

The only answer I have relates to something that Jim said. I asked one of the chicken farmers I supply how he was getting on with grain prices going up. I said, “Does that affect you?” He said, “No, the price I get for my chicken, with the supplier, is linked to the grain price. With the grain price going up, I actually get more, because they know I am paying more for the grain.” I am not suggesting that we should get an intervention, with a min price or something, but in quite a number of places the food system is protected from these price shocks. We did not know that Putin was going to invade Ukraine and that diesel prices would go up. How you actually manage that as a Government is extremely hard, I think, but it is the reality of what is happening in farming now: the farmer is suffering huge shocks, but he has a contract to supply grain and he just has to get on with it.

To come back to the grain buyer, there is one thing that really annoys me. I can sell forward. If I wanted, today I could sell my 2026-27 harvest; I could receive a price and say, “Right, I can make a profit on that.” But if I have another terrible harvest like in 2025, where instead of having 500 tonnes I have 200 tonnes, I will have to make up the difference as a farmer when that grain trader says, “I want the other 300 tonnes.” If I have had a really bad harvest, the price will be higher and it will cost me a lot of money. It is not encouraging me to take advantage of a good price. You wait until you have harvested and you take your price then.

It just seems like that is something where the supply side could help farmers, if we have these shocks from climate, diesel or fertiliser. I actually worked out that I have paid 34% more for my fertiliser this year than last year. As Rupert Lowe was saying, I have bought it early, because the Government are introducing a carbon tax on it from 1 January, so I know it will go up after that. That kills cash flow, because I have paid everything up front.

I do not have the answer, but there are these shocks. How do we protect farmers? How do we keep them going through this rough time? We cannot say that every summer will be like the one that we have just had. You do not want to put something in place and say, “That’s it,” but I think we need something, when these major shocks are happening that do not have anything to do with farming, if we are going to get increasingly concerned about food security. I am not growing food in the high-risk environment that we have at the moment; I am going to minimise the amount of food I grow, because I just cannot afford it.

Chair: Thank you for that. It is not necessary for all three of you to answer every question, so unless either Jim or Bal has a specific comment on farming, perhaps we will move on to Rupert’s next question.

Jim Bligh: I did have a comment on the extra costs and DEFRA’s capability. DEFRA is an economic Department—Paul Kissack, the permanent secretary, has said at the EFRA Committee that it is an economic Department, and that is right—but I do not think that it always behaves as an economic Department or is viewed as such by other Departments. When you have a crisis, or even when you do not, I am not convinced that DEFRA is able to pull the levers across Government for the food system in a way that a Department such as the Treasury might be able to.

There is something about how it goes about engaging across Government. Some of the annual £8 billion in extra costs that I mentioned comes from the Treasury, some comes from DBT, some comes from the Department of Health and some comes from DEFRA itself, but I am not sure that even within the Department there is a view on cost overall. When we say, “This is an extra £2 billion, and the Government are already whacking us with an extra £6 billion,” there is not the ability to arbitrate across Government or to prioritise what should happen and what the impact on the food system should be at different times. Very often, it all comes in at once, as we have seen in the last two years. That limits our ability as an industry across the board.

Balwinder Dhoot: There are volatilities and costs that are out of a Government’s control: wars, the climate, third countries putting tariffs on. Then there are things that are within its control: the cost of energy, regulation such as the packaging regulation, which probably affect farmers less but which hit the farmers’ customers, meaning that they are less able to invest in farming. As well as the external volatility, there is a volatility in policy and policy costs, which really does make business far more difficult. All of that undermines investment in resilience.

Chair: Rupert, a quick question.

Q11        Rupert Lowe: You mentioned planning for solar panels, and planning is a major problem for farmers who want to diversify. My next major question is on the transition from EU subsidies to the sustainable farming incentive. As we know, the window recently closed, which I missed, as did most farmers, because they were drilling. DEFRA has been an absolute shambles in terms of administering grant payments—they have been late; they have been a complete mess. It is led by the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, who has really very little knowledge of farming—she is not a farmer herself. Do you really think that DEFRA is fit for purpose? My question really is whether farmers would not be better with no Government intervention at all, rather than all this red tape, which is effectively strangling the farming industry.

Harry Metcalfe: No one else is going to answer, so I’m going to answer that one.

Rupert Lowe: What do you think? That is my view, anyway.

Harry Metcalfe: We have seen what happens. The trouble is that we are competing on a global stage, and an awful lot of the farmers we are competing against are also helped by a Government—in the EU, and in America. We can say, “Right, we’ll go on the world market.” The last few years have shown that we cannot compete, as growers on this crowded island, on growing wheat or grains. We are not there.

The thing that always gets me is the livestock sector, which has had a big rise recently. Real protein has come back as an on-trend thing. The vegan and the non-meat diet did not take off as they expected. Real meat is coming back—real foods, pure foods—and the price of sheep and cattle has gone up recently. But that is much closer to the market. The market for livestock is decided at local markets—the Skipton or the Northampton market; it is not decided by this grain trader in Chicago who is just looking at trends and does not actually have a fear of things on the road. It is interesting that the livestock sector is doing okay at the moment—

Q12        Rupert Lowe: It is, Harry, but we do not have equivalence of quality. Our welfare standards for our chickens or our other animals are much better than other people’s, so it is hardly surprising that we are undercut by certain export markets. The first thing the Government should do is create equivalence of quality; otherwise, you are not comparing like with like.

Harry Metcalfe: I completely agree with that. We have seen that with eggs, haven’t we? We have a different standard. Livestock standards in this country are, I think, second to none. We have the Red Tractor and all the linking back. I think we are good at that, but it is a much more realistic market and it is easier to control because it is all done locally. The processing—the slaughterhouse side of it—is getting tricky, but that is another matter. There is quite a lot in between the livestock leaving my farm and then getting to the supermarket, but generally that is a reasonably healthy sector, apart from the herd number is slightly coming down, because you have to dedicate an awful lot of hours. Trying to find good stockmen today is trickier because looking after stock is a 24/7 business, and not everybody wants to do that.

Rupert Lowe: Everything costs money though, doesn’t it?

Harry Metcalfe: Yes.

Q13        Rachel Gilmour: I should say that as well as being the Member of Parliament for Tiverton and Minehead, which is a very rural constituency with lots of wonderful farmers, I am also co-chair of the farming APPG. I am quite reassured to hear a couple of things you have said, not least because the APPG has just written to DEFRA to ask it to be more strategic and more cross-departmental in the way it approaches matters. In my own right, I have written to the NAO asking them to look at DEFRA and make sure that food production and farming sits at the heart of its strategy rather than on the peripheries.

In a way, you have answered my question, but I have been told I have to ask it, and I always do what I am told, as everybody knows. How prepared do you think the farming sector is for a major disruption, whether in respect of fuel supplies, droughts, as we have seen over the summer, or flooding, as we are inevitably about to get this winter? Harry, you can go first.

Harry Metcalfe: I’m afraid I do not think we are prepared at all in my sector. In the arable side we are not prepared. With my friends who are not farmers, I compare farming to having a factory: you produce food, but you do so without a roof on your factory. If it suddenly rains at the wrong time, or if it does not rain or whatever, you are stuffed. You go through all the processes, and you do everything you can—we have the best equipment and we have done everything we can—but your output is determined by that happens with the weather. People talk about reservoirs, but there is no way you are going to create a reservoir and then spray your arable crops, as the costs are huge. The trouble is that I am right up against it on cash flow, so I do not actually have the money to invest to do that.

It is a different matter when you are dealing with a pig farm, poultry farm or dairy farm, because that is a completely different business to the arable sector. With the shocks, from a livestock and welfare point of view, they do need to invest, and they do need water. I think that water capture should just be everywhere on all farms. That is the sort of thing where the grant system is in place, and there is investment, but it should be encouraged more.

We have this climate change, so what we are going to do about it? I think DEFRA should be on the front foot and leading, because it is the one that is handing out the money. It wants the money to be spent right, and we want food security, so I think DEFRA should just get on the front foot.

Q14        Rachel Gilmour: Food security is national security. I always say this about my farmers, who I love: farmers are actually on the frontline when it comes to climate change. My farmers could have told you a few years ago what was going to happen this summer, and they have adapted as best they can, such as with the grasses they grow and things like that. What disruptions over the past few years do you think have had the biggest impact on farmers? Have they adjusted, or have they not?

Harry Metcalfe: You have the outside shocks—Putin again and Ukraine, which was a sudden energy shock. The odd bit about that is the fact that the breadbasket was Ukraine and Russia, so we did see prices improve, and 2022 was a good year. There is me saying that we have had four of the worst years since 2020, but 2022, if you were selling grain, was a very good year. We are living off that.

I do not know what they can do in my sector beyond what they are doing. Farmers know it, but what I am doing is de-risking, looking at SFI, what I can do to boost the fertility of soil and things to build up water retention in the soil. It is such a long-term solution; it does not cure when farming has the sudden shocks to food security, and that is why we rely on imports at those moments. The thing is that, this time, we also had Europe having a really bad harvest, so it was not easy at all. We have also had the vegetable shocks when Morocco gets a sudden storm, so I feel that we a very exposed to food security at the moment.

Q15        Matt Turmaine: I should declare an interest, in that I do not own a farm.

Chair: That is a negative interest.

Matt Turmaine: I would like to talk a little bit about international comparisons. What do you feel we can learn from other countries about how they are approaching food supply resilience by working with manufacturers and retailers?

Jim Bligh: I think most of western Europe is in a similar place to us, so there is not a stand-out economy for me that is doing particularly well. I think Professor Lang, who you are seeing later, has done quite a lot of research into this and will be very well placed to answer the question.

I would say that a characteristic shared across those that are more resilient is the fact that they have planned together—so Government and industry working together to horizon-scan and anticipate what might happen further down the line. Sometimes, such as with covid, Ukraine and Iran, that is extremely difficult to do. However, it is easier to do when, for example, you have a trade change such as Brexit, as you can anticipate in advance, change your purchasing, adapt your supply chains and so on.

The other part I would mention is about local resilience and household resilience. The Cabinet Office is rightly trying to help citizens prepare in case there is any significant shock going forward. What I think we have seen, through the work that it has been talking about this summer in the media and so on, is that really not that many people in Britain are prepared, with water or tinned food, for something that could go significantly wrong. Working at the local level with retailers to identify what could happen in the event of flooding or terrible weather in a particular region, as well as working with households, would boost our national resilience quite significantly. Everyone remembers the trauma at the beginning of covid. Supermarkets stepped up to meet that challenge, and very much did. There was virtually no supply problem. There were perceptions of supply problems with eggs and toilet rolls, but virtually no supply problem, because the industry is resilient and adaptable without support from Government. I think the nature of the shocks that we face in the coming years, as we have seen in the last couple of years, means that we have to all work together more closely to anticipate what is coming and build up supply.

Q16        Matt Turmaine: That is really helpful. Thank you. Does either of the rest of the panel have anything they would like to say on that?

Balwinder Dhoot: I would just add that the NAO Report referenced some of the activities in other countries. It is probably worth looking at that and seeing what we can copy in terms of critical infrastructure mapping, scenario planning around particular things that could play out, and more Government-industry collaboration. In our experience, the Government have tended to engage us when a crisis starts, and there should be more work on preparing for future crises. To be fair to DEFRA, they have started doing that. There was a food preparedness meeting last week, which I attended, bringing together business, Government and third-sector organisations to do some scenario planning, so I think they are taking that seriously. The permanent secretary was involved in the meeting, so I can see that that has become a much higher priority, which is very welcome. But I would probably add that that deals with shocks, and I think you need to also think about the longer-term resilience of the system.

Q17        Matt Turmaine: Yes, that makes a high degree of sense. Do you look at other sectors such as energy with envious eyes, thinking that the Government is so much better at engaging with it? If so, what could it do?

Jim Bligh: I would say two things. One is about the industrial strategy. There are industries in the industrial strategy that are all hugely important and that get benefits in, for example, the British industrial competitiveness scheme to support their energy use—the ceramics sector, for example. However, a critical national infrastructure sector such as food gets none of that support at all, and the outcome is less investment and higher prices for consumers. That is a choice. The Government can keep making that choice if it wants and can expect more of the same, or it could provide more support, which would be particularly helpful. Given that we are a critical national infrastructure sector, prioritise it through that.

The other question is: has the Department done enough thinking about what would happen if, for example, there were a nationwide shortage of diesel or unleaded fuel? Who gets priority? We saw that over CO₂ a couple of years ago. DEFRA rightly identified who did get priority and made a decent list in order, but I am not convinced that we have that on, for example, diesel or on major energy shortages if there were a cyber-attack on the national grid. They need to prioritise a bit more to make sure that we are reflected and respected as part of the crucial industries that this country absolutely relies on.

Matt Turmaine: That’s brilliant. Thank you very much indeed. Harry?

Harry Metcalfe: The only bit I would add—the two guys beside me are much more expert in this—is that it is worth highlighting that devolution means the Scottish farmer has a very different scenario from the English farmer, which I find strange. Wales I will park just for the moment, but Scottish farmers still get the basic farm payment. They still get a payment per acre, so they are insulated when they have a bad harvest, whereas the English farmer is on his own. I am sure we will come on to SFI and what happened in trying to apply for it. But if you are not on the SFI and you are not receiving the single farm payment—no farmers in England are any more—you are very exposed to the world price. The Scottish farmer is insulated because he is getting his payment. I find it bizarre that as a country we are not all joined up and have the same support. And DEFRA is only actually in England.

Rupert Lowe: They have got the weather and the subsidy this year.

Harry Metcalfe: They have. They have done very well.

Matt Turmaine: That’s great. Thank you very much. I know you are aware of time, Chair, so I will end it there.

Q18        Chair: I want to frame a question for you. Farming is composed of a lot of relatively small businesses. Jim and Bal, your clients tend to be large businesses. How can we ensure that the farmer gets a fair deal from your businesses? Jim first.

Jim Bligh: It’s a very good question. What we face is a lot of negotiations with individual suppliers. Retail tries to be as fair and equitable as it possibly can, taking into account the needs of different suppliers as well. But there are also areas where there are collectively agreed prices, which scale up the impact for farmers and farms. There is a market forces question about how the industry changes over time to meet the fact that its buyers are much bigger entities, but ultimately retailers try to get the best price for customers, at the end of the day. Part of that is protecting the viability of farming businesses and manufacturing businesses. It is in our interests that we have a healthy, vibrant farming sector. The market would sort itself out into a different shape if that was where it needed to go.

Q19        Chair: It is quite obvious, looking at the advertising, that some of your members want to support British farmers. Others want to buy it as cheaply as they can around the world. How do we get all your members actually wanting to support their own domestic agriculture, because in the long term that is in the interests of food supply resilience?

Jim Bligh: I would not agree with the characterisation. All the 12 major supermarkets, including the online and frozen parts of the industry, will prioritise British farming. All of them talk about it. All of them have long-term relationships with British farmers and are working more and more closely with them. As part of our increased focus on resilience, we are trying to increase that production as well, but to be resilient you also must have a diverse supply chain to make sure that you do not end up with the empty shelves that are the hallmark of failure for a supermarket. We will diversify as much as we can.

Bal mentioned the weather issues that Spain and north Africa have had in the last couple of years. If we, as citizens, want to go into a supermarket in December and get fresh fruit and vegetables that are not grown here, we have to accept that they will come from overseas and that that may very well come with a premium and prices will be higher. We have an expectation, as citizens, that we will have that full choice throughout the year. That is why supermarkets will be as various as possible in the supply chain, but all 12 supermarkets are clearly focused on supporting British farmers. I think that has changed in the last few years. I think that has grown, and the importance of it to those supermarkets has grown. We will see that as the domestically produced part of our food chain increases as time goes on.

Q20        Chair: Thank you for that answer. It is difficult. I want to get Bal’s view on that question, and Harry’s view as to whether he thinks he gets a fair deal from the supermarkets. Bal, do you have a comment?

Balwinder Dhoot: I have three quick points. Many of our members work really closely with British farmers. They have long-term contracts. They have the same farms supplying them for decades and the farmers will get a premium. They will work collectively to ensure that you get more sustainable farming, so you have some really strong relationships in the sector. We want more domestic production because it is economical and it is the right business decision. Some things we have talked about, such as resilience and investment, will drive that. It is in our members’ interests and the industry’s interests to have a resilient supply chain—the last four or five years have really shown the consequences of not having a resilient supply chain—but that also means being able to source from overseas. A supply chain is most resilient when it has multiple sources of supply.

There is a scenario where you have more domestic production because people are prepared to invest, it is the right business decision and there is a market for it. That is a very good outcome. At the moment—we have all touched on it—the business environment, on top of the climate and the geopolitics, is making that very hard.

Q21        Chair: Harry, do you get a fair deal from the supermarkets?

Harry Metcalfe: It is hard to tell, because you are not selling direct to the supermarkets and they deal in a volume that no one farmer can supply. I think that we also have the problem in the UK that we unfortunately consume a huge amount of processed food, and that processed food hides the source of the food because it is just a priced commodity. Some supermarkets do sell extremely good British produce and it is a sale to certain of their customers but there are an awful lot of customers driven on price and I am not sure if they are loyal. The supermarkets are about profit and if they are buying it cheaper, I would question how much they support British farmers. Some do, but it is not universal.

It is interesting—my dear neighbour Mr Clarkson supplies only British food in his shops and his restaurant. He has struggled to get mustard or coffee. You cannot have a coffee at Clarkson’s farm. Supermarkets will provide food from everywhere in the world. The British farmer cannot supply it. I wish they would support the British sector as much as they can, particularly on milk and things. But it is a struggle, because they are trying to make profit as well.

Chair: We may come back to the diversity of processing and whether it is in this country or not. A lot of the coffee that we buy in our supermarkets is roasted in Germany, not in the UK, yet we drink huge quantities of it. We may come on to supply chain, but my excellent deputy Clive Betts wants to come in.

Q22        Mr Betts: What Harry just said is interesting, and I think it is right. Of course a lot of customers will look at how much things cost in the current climate, but it would help if the supermarkets were more up front about where things came from, would it not? Often you see “This is British”, but it is unclear when things do not come from this country and where they do come from.

Harry Metcalfe: This has been a farmer annoyance for some time, because where it is packaged defines the country of origin, not actually where it was grown. Farmers have really challenged that in the past, because how can something that is just packaged in a country but is grown outside a country be classed as UK-grown? That is just not right. But I think that is changing. People are aware of this, but I do not think the public are. That is what I would like to see changed, so that there is more emphasis on British food and it really is British food, because I have to go through the audit of Red Tractor and things—all British farmers do that. It is traceability—that all came about because of salmonella, mad cow disease and so on. Now we have traceability all in place, we should maximise it and show the quality of British food over other countries that do not have any of that traceability.

Q23        Mr Betts: I think Jim mentioned the critical national infrastructure database, and the fact that food supply chains are not part of it. Should they be part of it? Would there be an advantage if they were?

Jim Bligh: Yes, and part of that is about the assets that we have in the industry. That goes from ports to the 131 food supply depots that are supplying the UK’s food entirely, logistics hubs and everything throughout the chain—food manufacturing centres, for example, and the largest supermarkets. I am not aware that any of these are protected assets, and on earlier discussions about were there to be a crisis, I am not sure that there is a plan to ensure that those assets are registered and given the support that they need.

Our ask is that DEFRA step up to work with the Cabinet Office to make really clear what matters and what does not, and what support can be provided. To give the Department their credit, they have rightly set this up recently. They have a very good team of officials looking at security and resilience. Hopefully, that will head us in the right direction, but we are not there yet and not enough action has been taken.

Balwinder Dhoot: The food system is very big and very diverse. You don’t need to capture all of it. What you need to look at is, what are the critical bits? If they are disrupted, how much impact does it have on food availability? How substitutable are those elements? Can someone else step in to that production? Will a particular element falling over have a knock-on impact on other bits? Also, the scale of impact, whether on communities or geographic reach. If you look at those criteria, you can probably identify the key bits of the system that you need to put on the database and monitor. Then, you need to understand how resilient those elements are in particular types of shocks. How easy is it for them to get fuel? How quickly can they get reconnected to the grid? Is their workforce able to travel into those premises or that area to work? It is about doing that sort of testing. You would not be able to do it on the whole system, but it is about identifying the key nodes that are critical to the functioning.

Q24        Mr Betts: You were saying that DEFRA is a bit more interested these days. Are they the sorts of issues that DEFRA is looking at seriously?

Balwinder Dhoot: There is definitely an uptick. Like I said, there was the meeting last week, and I think that is the beginning of this work to look at the system. I would take that as a real positive. I think previously that has not been done because the system has been seen as quite dispersed and large, and there is no single point of failure. I think the energy grid is probably different; there probably are certain elements that could knock out the grid. I think that assumption needs to be tested.

Q25        Mr Betts: Is the Government taking potential threats to food security and food supply chains as seriously as those to energy supply?

Jim Bligh: I would answer no, and I will give an example. During the Iran crisis, at the very beginning we could all see what was happening to petrol and diesel prices in particular. We could also then forecast what would happen to fertiliser, and so on, and the impact then on food price inflation. The Food and Drink Federation and the IGD came out with a very high number for food price inflation that has not yet come to pass, but we expect a very significant number to unwind towards the middle of next year or so.

At the BRC, we pulled together a group of retailers and invited DEFRA officials to come and join that group. We put the issues on the table and all the actions that the Government could take to help support our industry. I do not think any of those actions were taken. Week after week we would have meetings that we convened with officials where we would go through that list of actions and there would be no progress against any of them.

If Government was prepared to mitigate this shock, it would have been ready to, first, convene that itself, and secondly, to take the actions that were necessary to protect consumers.

Q26        Mr Betts: Is that list publicly available?

Jim Bligh: I think a variety of different lists that we produced at the time are, and I would happily write to the Committee with further information.

Mr Betts: That would be helpful.

Balwinder Dhoot: I will add to Jim’s point. Similarly, we had conversations around some of the things to take the pressure off prices. The only thing we have seen implemented is some tariff reductions. But some of those tariff reductions were on things that are competing with domestic production, so the overall impact on inflation was probably limited. But there was also a negative impact on businesses who produce food here.

Chair: I think this CNI mapping and registering is very important. Just to get it on the record, the NFU have produced a very useful list of which they say they should include abattoirs, rendering, dairy processing, milk collection, hatcheries, feed mills, fertiliser, carbon dioxide supply, veterinary laboratories, medicine, coleslaw, wholesale markets, horticultural pack houses, key ports and distribution routes. I think that is something they should be clearly mapping. I see lots of nods from our witnesses, so obviously you all agree.

Q27        Rachel Gilmour: Rupert has briefly touched on this, and it is certainly something that has been an issue for me and other members of the Committee. The Government’s land use framework set out its approach to balancing the different demands on our land. How effective do you think it is, or it might be, in terms of food production? So getting the balance right between food production and other land uses.

Harry Metcalfe: I think the market will decide. They can produce a report like that, but I really think the market will decide. What is land use for? It is for the community. We want to be producing whatever the community needs. I find this debate on solar farms a really interesting one because the predictions I have seen are that by 2035 it could take 70,000 hectares out of production. At the moment, there are 6.1 million hectares in production, so it is not a massive impact.

People feel very strongly about it because it is the wrong use of land. I would challenge that and say that we need power. We are going to increasingly use power. It is not a bad use of land, and it is for 25 years; it is not forever. I am wondering whether I should be planting trees because, if we are going to be really serious on net zero, perhaps it is a more environmentally friendly way of building houses. In 100 years’ time, we might all be using wood.

On the Government trying to do a framework, I think the market decides on that one. I am not one that says that it is the right thing for Government to decide. We do not know.

Q28        Rachel Gilmour: I do not mind solar farms going on very poor-grade agricultural land. What I do object to is solar farms going on very good agricultural land. I know enough about agriculture to walk a field and say to that farmer, “You are able to grow this because this is premium land.” Yet the solar investor has had a surveyor go in there—who is his surveyor—and say that it is really poor agricultural land. There has to be a mechanism where we can independently identify which land ought to be used for horticulture and agriculture, and which land we could free up, if we have to, to put those ghastly solar farms on, for example.

Harry Metcalfe: Again, I should declare an interest: I looked at putting solar on the farm in about 2011-12. It was very interesting, because it is all about the grid connection driving where the solar goes. You are seeing it going on very good land in Lincolnshire, purely because we had coal generation of electricity in that area, so there is very easy grid connection. If you put it in the areas of poor ground, quite often they are not very populated, as we see in Scotland, so it does not actually get the climate. It is another debate—we are going off at a slight tangent—but I think that land should be used in a way that meets the community’s needs. That can be supplying food or landscaping tourist areas, or it could be solar, because we are going to need more power. I have a more open view than perhaps the framework suggested.

Rupert Lowe: Viva rehabilitation!

Harry Metcalfe: Yes. We do not know.

Q29        Chair: Harry, to challenge what you have just said a bit, Savills estimate that the loss of farmed land has averaged 26,000 hectares a year since 2000. That is more than 500,000 hectares in two decades. That is quite a high percentage of your 6.1 million hectares in this country. Do you not think that we need to be watching carefully how much land we are taking out of farmed production?

Harry Metcalfe: Okay, I take that challenge on board because you are including development, roads and infrastructure as well. I was just challenging solar, which seems to be an emotional subject, and it is not actually taking that much ground out. If they do solar, I think they ought to do wind as well, because it is all about the grid connection. If you are going to do it, maximise that grid connection.

I agree. We are a very small island, but population growth has demanded a lot of land use—that is almost inevitable, given the population. We need to be growing our food, but as a farmer I come back to the cash-flow challenge, because I cannot grow it at current prices. It is not as easy as all that. If you had all that land and we all planted it with crops, the price would go down. What would I do that for?

Q30        Matt Turmaine: How are retailers currently working with local resilience forums, and what are they doing to help develop local plans to supply food in the event of disruption?

Jim Bligh: It is a mixed bag. Some are very good, but they are pretty young and nascent in their development. Each local resilience forum seems to take a different shape and different format, with different priorities and resources behind it. You asked about international examples before, and some of the better international examples are where those local resilience forums have connected really well directly with the people who are supplying and selling the food, and they understand what is available, what could happen in different environments and exercise for different crises that could come up in the area so they can really test themselves. We are not seeing that on a widespread basis yet, but that is not to say that it could not happen with the right framework and the right resource behind it.

Q31        Matt Turmaine: Brilliant. As a brief follow-up, can you give us some international examples of where they seem to be doing that well?

Jim Bligh: As I mentioned earlier, Professor Lang’s report looks across a few different economies—I think he looks at 10 to 12—and comes up with a few different areas where that has worked particularly well. You could also look at Wales and Scotland, where, as Harry said earlier, there is quite a lot more support provided at a local level, facilitated by the Welsh Government and the Scottish Government. So the Welsh Government would be a good place to start as well.

Q32        Chair: Jim, I would like to ask you two questions. We have not talked about processing at all today, but my example, picking up on what Harry said about coffee, applies to a lot of other sectors. We are seeing a decline in slaughterhouses, and we are seeing a lot more food being processed abroad than it ever used to be. Is that not a real threat to our resilience in the future if we had a worldwide drought or one of the other major risks? Is it not a risk that we do not have this processing capacity in this country?

Jim Bligh: Yes, it is a risk. All parts of the supply chain need to make sure that we have enough to be able to operate on our own should we need to and should we not be able to import from overseas. My experience of the food processing side is that quite a lot more of it is processed here than overseas, but there are components and ingredients that will come through by necessity from other countries because we do not have them here.

Carbon dioxide is an interesting one, because the UK does not have huge capacity for home-grown CO2. If you are looking at abattoirs or soft drinks, from one end of the scale of importance to the other, do we have enough to do either of those if we needed to? Probably not. As part of the mapping exercise we do across the map of critical national infrastructure, we should identify where we have weaknesses and where we do not. That should enable us to plug the gap.

There is the question of why you might want to process overseas and import to the UK. Sometimes that is just where the manufacturing happens to take place at the lowest cost, and sometimes that is where manufacturing happens because that is where the ingredients are. But very often that comes down to cost.

At all parts of the chain, we must ensure we are not piling too much cost on and making it too expensive to do things here, and that we are creating the right incentives so that we are growing and processing food here and you can run a business effectively and profitably here. That has been the economy-wide challenge that we have faced—it is quite difficult to make a profit, and that holds back the whole food supply chain and its resilience.

Q33        Chair: Part of the reason that food processors—particularly if they use a lot of energy—find it difficult to exist here is that our energy prices are among the highest in the world. That is not exclusive to processing businesses; lots of other industries use high-energy processes. But is that a problem? We have food processed elsewhere, as I said: German coffee and Danish bacon. There are foods increasingly produced elsewhere; France produces an awful lot of dairy food. Is that a real problem? Should we not be encouraging more food production in this country?

Jim Bligh: We should. Energy costs are an enormous problem. The BRC put out a report last week that said that in one year, retailers are spending £440 million more just on electricity. Those costs are passed on to customers at the end of the day in the form of higher prices, and there will be less investment for the rest of the chain. Given that that is the crisis we face, that comes back to the industrial strategy as well. That is why it is so important that the everyday economy gets the right support from central Government—

Q34        Chair: Sorry, I am concentrating my questions; Rachel will come in at the end on farming. On just-in-time food supply, we saw very quickly during the early weeks of the pandemic shelves emptying and panic buying starting. Is there more we should or could be doing to have a little more food stock, though I know it is expensive?

Jim Bligh: Stock is expensive to store, as you say. There is no national central stockpile like there used to be before the 1990s, but that is slightly separate. With covid, there was not a supply shortage with any of those items that sold out. There was a perception that there was going to be—eggs are such a good example.

Chair: Hence why I said panic buying.

Jim Bligh: Absolutely. The Government call that, euphemistically, adaptive purchasing behaviour. If you go into a store and you see that the shelves are empty for the product that you want, you will probably go to another store. The third most important thing to a consumer is availability. No. 1 is of course price, but availability is just behind that.

Panic buying is quite easy to generate, particularly if you tell people to buy a particular type of product—they will go out to buy it. For example, if the Government were to say to you, “Go and buy x litres of water,” would we run out of water? I do not know, but that is something that is worth testing and thinking about: do we have the supply, who is storing it, and how can we ensure it is efficiently stored there as well?

Just-in-time works. It creates the cost efficiencies that we need to keep our grocery basket the lowest priced in western Europe. It does work. There is an argument for just-in-case as well. Supermarkets that I have spoken to have increased the amount that they have in stock. Would that be enough to meet a significant national food emergency? I do not think it would. That is where all parts of the system must come together and plan for what and how much we would need. That is also where household resilience comes into it. If every household has three days’ worth of food and water, that takes you quite a long way towards avoiding those problems at shelf edge.

Q35        Chair: We want to get the maximum out of this hearing. Do you think the Government—all three of you might want to comment on this—could do more in educating us on those food supply problems?

Jim Bligh: I think so, yes. Citizens should be aware, just as they are in Sweden, Spain or other countries around Europe, of the importance of having supply at home. It could be that your water is cut off and you cannot get it back up. It could be that there is a significant drought and you are using standpipes in the street. Water companies were talking about that only yesterday. Are customers aware of what to do? I am not sure they are. We definitely can educate more. However, that is also the case for educating about where your food is from, how you cook it or how you create a meal from scratch. Food really is important. It really is an economic driver, and a driver of behaviours, health and everything else. I think we all have to stand up to try to improve food education, and that includes education about resilience.

Q36        Chair: Thank you, Jim. I think Rachel is going to come back to Harry on farming matters in a minute, but, Bal, finally, is there anything you want to add on any of those questions?

Balwinder Dhoot: On the point about energy, I do not think you can emphasise enough the impact it has on businesses’ decisions to invest in this country. For a manufacturing business, energy will make up at least 10% of its input costs: processing, canning, heating and chilling. If you are twice as expensive as somewhere else, and the investor is headquartered in another country and looking at Europe, the UK gets knocked off that list very quickly. As I have said before, that then has a knock-on impact because, if that processing moves, the ingredients bought will not be British ingredients. It has a knock-on impact on the supply chain.

I would also say that the talk about food security is often focused on farming; that is obviously the crux of it and really important, but you need to look at the supply chain and how it supports farming. If you ignore that, you will not achieve the outcomes that you want.

Q37        Rupert Lowe: On that subject, I have one for Bal. I saw that you were involved in the covid response. Do you think it was more about the Government response or the private sector response? It seems to me that, if we have a healthy private sector, you do not need Government intervention; it can cope, to Jim’s point, with most of these issues. So, on covid, are there lessons to be learned? Does the state try to pin a medal on itself when, actually, it is the private sector that saves the day?

Balwinder Dhoot: I think the private sector was incredible. If you had said to someone before covid, “We are going to shut down the hospitality sector,” no one would have predicted that the outcome would be anywhere near as good as what played out. That was the private sector.

The role of Government was also important there, because they got out of the way where they needed to, with things like suspending competition law, easements on drivers’ hours and looking at labelling changes. They played a role in loosening the rules. What I would suggest for Government is that they make sure they have those levers in place, ready to respond straightaway the next time we get that sort of crisis, to allow the private sector to do that.

I think there is much more of a private sector-Government partnership where you have vulnerable communities and so on, and you need the Government to intervene to support the private sector and make sure that it is not just a market-based mechanism—that there are people in old people’s homes, for example, who may be financially disadvantaged, who are getting the food. Really, food security and resilience is about partnership; it needs Government and industry to work together, in terms of both shocks and building the long-term resilience of the system.

Q38        Rachel Gilmour: This is one for Harry. It is really, really easy—

Harry Metcalfe: I hope so!

Rachel Gilmour: I am not going to give you any leeway at all. What is the one thing that you would like the Government to do to better support farmers? Just one thing.

Harry Metcalfe: That is hard to put into one thing. I want the Government to understand that farming is not a straightforward business; it does not work to normal business principles, and it is a long-term business. It frustrates the hell out of me when I see SFIs; it is a three-year agreement, they open a window and you’ve got five hours to do it—and then that’s it. They do not seem to recognise that farming works to seasons. You are not even working to one year; you are working to five or six years.

I always say that I am a custodian of the landscape; I am not actually in a business that will buy and sell. I am going off on one, but just understanding farming better would be my principal, one thing. When the inheritance tax thing happened—I am going to bring that up—it was an illustration that, “Hang on a minute, Government doesn’t understand how farming works.”

Farmers do not sell farms; as I say, I am a custodian. I have just looked at this, and 0.4% of land is sold a year. That means the average turnover of farm is around 200 years. That is how long term it is. A house is generally traded about every four or nine years—something like that—depending on if it is a flat or a main house. Farming is a very long-term business.

We are in the business of food production. We are not being encouraged to grow food at the moment. SFI is doing a lot for environmental things, and I am very pleased with what I have seen on the farm—I have done some of those things, and I have seen an improvement in nature—but this meeting is about food security. The Government really have to look at it to encourage me to get back producing food again. That is going to help, and I do not think they recognise that. I am extremely grateful that you are having these meetings, because I want this to move right up the agenda, because it is critical. If we are going to get these events happening every other year, it is even more critical.

These guys with me are super good at distribution, as shown in covid. I was astonished at how food did not run out. That Moroccan thing did not seem to make a difference. We are good at some things, but the fundamental is growing food, and the farmer is right at the core of it, and I want understanding for that. Don’t keep knocking us. We want to grow food, but we need encouragement in these very difficult times. With these outside shocks, we need a bit of hand-holding to encourage us to grow food. That is my point.

Chair: Harry, that is a fantastic last word to finish our session on. I thank you and your fellow witnesses very much. This has been an incredibly interesting session. You are busy people, and we appreciate that you have come today to give us the benefit of your knowledge.

Examination of witnesses

Witnesses: Professor Tim Lang and Professor Neil Ward.

Chair: Welcome back to the Public Accounts Committee on Monday 12 October 2026. We now move to our second panel as we explore the resilience of the UK’s food supply during disruptions. I extend a very warm welcome to both witnesses. Thank you; you are busy people and we are very grateful that you have come to give us the benefit of your knowledge. May I ask you both—perhaps starting with you, Neil—to introduce yourselves and tell us a little about what your connection to the industry is?

Professor Ward: I am Neil Ward. I am based at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, in the school of environmental sciences. I am a director of a new organisation called Root and Reason, which works on food resilience. Last year, we produced “The Roadmap for Resilience: A UK Food Plan for 2050.” Since then, resilience has become even more pressing.

Chair: Brilliant. Thank you very much. I assume that report is available online.

Professor Ward: Yes, and I can leave a copy for the Committee.

Chair: Thank you. Professor Tim Lang, please.

Professor Lang: I am Tim Lang. I am a retired professor of food policy, which means that I work full-time on resilience. I founded and used to head the Centre for Food Policy at City University, which is as far from a farm as you can get in Britain, but we cover the agrifood system—from farm to consumption—and its impacts. I am probably here because I am the author of a big report for the National Preparedness Commission called, “Just in Case”, which looked at whether Britain was prepared for shocks—the short answer is no.

Q39        Chair: Let us start with you, Professor Ward. The Government are taxing farmers more and reducing subsidies. Is the era of cheap food over?

Professor Ward: You can find plenty of people who think that food is too cheap in the UK and that it needs to be more expensive, but the idea of cheap food is deeply ingrained. It goes back 200 years, to the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846; for decades and decades and decades, because of our imperial situation, we had an urban industrial working class who needed feeding cheaply, so sourcing food from wherever we could get it cheaply was the dominant way of thinking. Only in the second world war was that destabilised, but a couple of decades after the war we gravitated back to, “Get your food from wherever you know you can get it cheaply.” At the start of the second world war, we were only 30% self-sufficient in food in the UK, so the situation now is quite a good deal stronger than it was in the late 1930s.

Professor Lang:  I agree. Certainly the academics and, indeed, policy analysts agree that food is both too cheap and too expensive. There are huge problems about the economics of externalities, as I am sure this Committee knows only too well. Do you include in that price of food the cost to the environment, the cost to public health from diet, the cost to the atmosphere and all sorts of other things?

The real problem is what Neil was alluding to: that British feeding culture still expects and is based around thinking that food will be cheap, so that we do not have to think about it, whereas in fact the whole economy has changed, not just the food economy that we work on. The cost of housing has rocketed; the cost of moving, of transport, has rocketed; the cost of a phone has rocketed. That is a squeeze on the food economy, because food is what consumers spend their money on after all the fixed costs are taken.

There is a real, delicate politics—as you will know only too well, as elected people—about the cost of food, and whether that is rising beyond real costs. That politics is very real indeed. I think Neil and I would agree that it goes back to the gain that the landed interest made in 1815 with the impositions of tariffs, and then 31 years of arguments ending, as Neil rightly said, with the repeal of the corn laws in 1846. Slowly, British farming went into decline, and the sourcing went global to the empire.

Shock number one was world war one. It was back to business as usual afterwards, and then there was the bigger shock of world war two. In the post-second world war settlement, the Agriculture Act 1947 said that we needed to rebuild agriculture. We did, and we then joined the European Union—a different model of supporting agriculture. Ten years after leaving it, we have lost our way about quite what to do. We do not have a food policy. We have a bit of a farming policy and an environment policy, but we do not have a food policy.

The politics of the cost of food is enormous. I looked at it as closely as I could in my “Just in Case” report, where I looked at the potential shocks. One of the shocks is going on right now, which is the slow, inexorable rise of food price inflation—not food prices, but food price inflation. It is over and above the cost of living, but the squeeze from beyond the food system is part of the problem. We have to address the British culture of assuming that food is cheap and we just have it and it is always there, versus the total cost of what we want out of our lives. That goes way beyond food.

Q40        Chair: I will ask Neil this question in a minute. Are there any particular risks to the food supply chain that the Government are currently underestimating?

Professor Lang: Yes—horticulture. We tend to assume we have lots of grains, but actually they have declined. Going back to the previous panel, the incentive for farmers to plant is getting weaker, but when you look at horticulture the situation is nigh catastrophic. Even under the EU common agricultural policy, horticulture had no subsidies. Other big commodities that British farming could contribute to did have subsidies—they certainly had guidance and clear sets of targets.

Horticulture has seen a weak, slow collapse, yet because of the external costs of healthcare—diet-related ill health—the clear, long-term epidemiological evidence, as well as other forms of evidence, shows that we ought to be growing more and consuming more. The British public is so far off meeting the very low requirements for eating healthily when it comes to fruit and vegetables that it is almost laughable—hysterical laughter in public health.

There is a real problem. Your Committee, the EFRA Committee and others—agricultural APPGs and so on—all know that there is a real lack of clarity about what land is for. I would throw into that, “What is food for?” What do you want from food and what do you want from land? The issue of resilience, which Neil and I have worked many years on, is part of that.

In preparing for shocks to the food system that are coming—indeed, some are here and more will come—we need to be clear what we want from food. At the end of my report, which was carried out through interviews and looking at the data, I argued that the purpose of the food system ought to be about feeding people well. If that is the core purpose, you plan land use around that. Some studies point out what Britain does not produce, which it could produce. It always comes back to horticulture. You cannot grow mangoes or melons—well, you can under glass or plastic, but you are not likely to grow pineapples or bananas, Britain’s favourite fruit. There is, however, a lot that we could and should be growing that we do not need to import. We could, and do, do that in a different way and to different standards than the minimum.

Q41        Chair: Neil, shocks to the food supply?

Professor Ward: I think you asked about “underestimated risks”. I have similar points to Tim’s. The first one is around our diet and health. If you talk to people responsible for managing the NHS and thinking about the NHS in 10, 15 or 20 years’ time, they are very worried about the mounting pressures on the NHS. Diet-related ill health is a major problem, and it is increasing as a problem.

Even though there is increasing interest among segments of the population in healthy eating and healthy living, in aggregate, for the population as a whole, we have a bad diet and it is not getting better. That is causing a fiscal problem in how you finance the NHS over the medium term. Larger even than that is the number of people out of work through ill health, where diet-related ill health is quite a weighty factor. You have about 2.7 million or 2.8 million people permanently out of work through ill health; that is not just a fiscal problem but one for productivity and the growth level of the UK plc. Our poor diet is a big economic problem, and I am not sure that that is fully appreciated and talked about enough in Government. That would be point No. 1.

The second point is the way we think about our national agricultural resource: our agricultural land, our soil quality and our capacity to produce food. It is actually really poorly matched to our nutritional needs. We have plenty of people growing loads of stuff, and it is not well matched to what a healthy diet would look like. We have about 85% of agricultural land area supporting animal agriculture. There is grazing land—some of it you cannot do much else with, so that is where animals might graze—but quite a large proportion of our arable land is basically growing animal feed to feed through animals to feed to humans.

If you think about our 17 million hectares of agricultural land, that is not an optimal, ideal way to feed the British population if you are interested in national self-sufficiency, food security or food resilience. They are factors that are a drag and are undermining the resilience of our system. I do not hear many people in Government talking about that mismatch.

Q42        Rachel Gilmour: What does a genuinely resilient food system look like? To add to that, to what extent has the UK’s food supply chain become too focused on efficiency at the expense of resilience?

Professor Lang: Shall I go first? It is hard to know where to start, to be absolutely honest. We have had 70 years—well, more than 70 years; my lifetime, so 79 years—since the Agriculture Act 1947. Like the rest of the western world, we have pursued a model of efficient agriculture that has been about replacing labour with oil-based technologies, crudely; about applying agrochemicals as fertilisers—one from another you will know about; about cutting waste on farms, but waste has gone to where it is equally massive off the farm; and about lengthening supply chains.

There was the myth of the Ladybird book back when I was young—you are nodding, Ms Gilmour: a farmer grew food and people ate what came from farms. That is complete nonsense. Farming gets almost none of the money. A vast amount of the profits and value added, if you use “value added” in NAO terms, goes off the land. There is a battle that goes on between giant food manufacturing, even more giant food retailing and the increasingly pretty big proto giant, hospitality. Primary production gets very little.

Meanwhile, there are new sectors like home delivery or the logistics industry. Actually, the logistics industry is really interesting. The money goes everywhere, so you end up with a situation where British consumers are spending £158 billion, or whatever it is, on food but primary production gets very little.

What could it look like—this was your question—if it was more sustainable and more resilient? It would have fewer single supply chains. After covid and all that experience, and looking at the geopolitics, the food industry is increasingly telling me that they are going to double, back up and diversify supply chains. But in resilience theory, what they should be aiming for is network suppliers: fewer distribution hubs through which all the foods go. That means multiple ways to get.

That 60-year-old resilience theory is now kicking in because of the first question that Sir Geoffrey was asking us, which is what sort of shocks are coming. You did not quite ask that, but lots of different sorts and scales of shocks are now coming, for which the system that we have designed and developed over the last 70 years is not prepared. It has actually been prepared to help those risks. It is almost designed to create those risks and vulnerabilities. Part of the thinking—the new wave of academics that Neil and I are part of—is looking at the total food system, not just agriculture.

Indeed, one of our very important points to you as a Committee that I for one really welcomed in the NAO Report reviewing DEFRA was that we need to have a food systems perspective, not an agricultural perspective. In a sense, where we are going to rescue agriculture from the benign difficulties it is in—from its neglect, really—is if we take a food systems approach and say, “What do we want from our food?”

That goes back to that core thing that I think we both raised: what is the point of food? Surely it is to feed people well, to make sure land is kept in a good condition that future generations can still adapt to—because it is going to change—and to make sure that we have built in flexibilities. If we want a more resilient food system, we have to build those flexibilities in. I want to be very clear to the Committee: that means undoing some of the things that we prided ourselves on as super efficiency, such as just in time delivery. That is not going to be the hallmark of the 2050s.

Diversity, storage and flexibility are the sorts of things that have been driven off the agenda in the name of super efficiency. We are going to be talking about how we cope with populations being fed under shocks, which may come and amplify each other, come in series or add new sorts of things. I have a very sober view. My answer is a very sober answer, but it is what we think now.

Q43        Chair: Do you agree with the witness in the last session who said that we have a sort of agricultural policy—and I emphasise sort of agricultural policy—but we do not have a food policy? Should we have a food policy?

Professor Lang: Yes. The previous panel are saying things that they did not like me saying 20 or 30 years ago. I can assure you because I have been in front of Committees for 40 years. They did not like it at all. But yes, it is good that they are now seeing it. If you want farming to survive, it has to become something very different. It has to be land management. Indeed, one of the people sat in my chair said that.

We have to have good land management, but not excluding food. At the moment, we have switched to the Agricultural Act, which is really all just about the environment. Having the environment within land policy and food policy is essential because looking after a good land infrastructure is the basis on which a food system sits, as does building the resilience and capacity to bounce back from shock. I am using the word formally. That is what resilience means, but it means in a way that can adapt to new circumstances.

The thing we always say in resilience and food resilience is, “Bounce back from shock, but to what?” To the old order, as Neil was describing it? No. We cannot afford to have such a bad diet. It is crippling the NHS, and yet we say that is what we have to do. We can sort out the food system and sort out the NHS at the same time—sort out welfare bills and public accounts.

Q44        Chair: Neil, lots to get our head around. Anything you wish to add to that?

Professor Ward: When thinking about resilience, there are acute shocks and stresses in the system, but it is important for a resilient food system to be coping with the chronic build-up of pressures. We must not think about resilience as just being about emergency planning; we must look at those big drivers of change in the food system that will unfold over the next 20 or 30 years. It is about resilience in the face of climate change and adapting to climate change, the health crisis and the squeeze around land use. We have a problem with multiple and competing objectives around land use, and we need some clarity to sort that out. There are also the geopolitical shocks and pressures; I think a witness in the last panel said that we now view the last six or seven years as the new normal. That is gradually sinking in.

When I started the work on “Roadmap for Resilience” in 2022, there were still a lot of people who thought there were these odd shocks that we just had to recover from to get back to where we were beforehand—build back better, just get back to where we were before the last crisis. But the crises are coming so thick and fast that geopolitical instability is how it is going to be.

Professor Lang: We are in a new situation. The Swedish Government called it food preparedness for a new era—absolutely spot on.

Chair: Very interesting.

Q45        Rupert Lowe: We would all accept that farming is a long-term business requiring a lot of capital investment over a long period of time, and it takes a long time to, if you like, feed the beast and ensure that we have secure food. Last year, it took a long time for Daniel Zeichner and his team to get out DEFRA’s 2025 food strategy, which sets out their long-term vision for food and supply chain resilience. Do you think that what has come out of the sausage machine is fit for purpose or not?

Professor Lang: Compared with the silence we had before, it is good to have something. Let me be very clear: we have not had guidance for 10 years. Indeed, when oil went from $45 a barrel to $100 in 2007-08—how good is your memory?—world food prices went up absolutely in tandem. That shook the Treasury and DEFRA at the time. A food review went on loosely in Government, led by DEFRA. People like me were involved in that, and it concluded, after two years of very large consultations, that we needed to have a new food strategy. It was called “Food 2030” and it was launched in early 2010. With a change of Government, that was all swept away. Basically, we have had nothing since. To get something, to answer your question, Mr Lowe, was a lot better.

Rupert Lowe: That was not my question.

Professor Lang: It was not your question, but I am giving the good news. Is it adequate? No, because of the enormity, for British politics, of which you are a part, and for policy making, of realising we have a different food system. There are different crises coming down the track, and indeed already here, and a different policy framework is needed. That is a very big shift for a Department—let me be very clear, as a DEFRA watcher—which is weak, small and lacking much high-level political support. One of the many things I appreciated the NAO Report for was that it gently, and in very low-key, genial NAO language, put it very firmly that there is not the attention. We have not got high-level attention.

If I can digress for a moment, Neil and I and about 35 other academic colleagues, and many from civil society, sent a letter to the Prime Minister and the First Secretary of State, Louise Haigh, last week, on 5 October, to urge them that in the civil contingencies review—not the agricultural review—food should feature very highly. I was a signatory to a coalition of food industry and civil society calling for a new food Bill three months ago. We all think that there is this empty hole at the heart of Government—they are not taking food seriously.

That is not something to point-score with this Government, but is actually looking back to say that British culture has been really bad politically. I, as a citizen, can blame all of you politically for not getting this high enough up the agenda. In that sense, there has been a little movement and—as I am sure you know—it is accelerating at the moment, because of the events that Neil described. I agree with him: events are making food security and food resilience higher profile.

I think we should push Government very hard, hold them to account to do more, on a bigger scale. The present Government are pouring out little initiatives, trying to fill the space, but actually the food system is so enormous that little projects here and there ain’t going to do it. It is big league change that we need to do, and to argue that, over the next 20 years, we have to go in a different direction from what we have done for the past 70 years. That is the conclusion of my “Just in Case” report and, if you really want to take climate change seriously, it is what Neil’s report, “The Roadmap for Resilience”, says.

In particular, I was looking at the public—at whether the public or food consumer culture is prepared—and I was very critical of DEFRA for being silent on that. You could just take “food” out of its title and call it DERA again, because that captures what the reality has been. That is why, in the letter that Neil and I sent last week—I was the lead person on that—we even suggested that the Prime Minister rename DEFRA as the Department for Environment and Food Security. That would hold it to account for what it is it doing for food security—the answer at the moment is not enough but a little more than it has been doing for the past 15 years. That is my honest answer.

Chair: Neil, do you want to add to that?

Professor Ward: To quote the strategy directly, “It has become increasingly apparent that the food system is driving negative impacts on our health, environment, and resilience that undermine our food security.” It is quite something for a Government strategy document to admit that, so there is a sense in which that document is quite a bold step in acknowledging some problems. But I think it is then, “Well, what is to be done about it? What is the long-term vision? What do we aspire to in, say, 2050?” That is where we are left with quite a lot of questions still.

It has also felt a little quiet on the strategy. It was as if there were an announcement some months ago, or 18 months ago, and there does not seem to be a lot of profile around what is happening. One has to work quite hard to find out what work is going on with that strategy. Some are concerned that it is not an open enough conversation. We have a lot of very good and very committed groups on food system reform, beyond the food companies themselves, and I think a concern is that the conversation might be happening just between Government and the food industry, without that wider set of voices.

It is always a challenge with DEFRA. It was interesting: I was working in the Cabinet Office about the time that the previous Labour Government were worrying about what to do with the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. I worked on proposals for a Department of Rural Affairs, which was the proposal in the 2001 general election. DEFRA is actually quite an accident of history. It was not meant to be like this; it was meant to be a Department for rural development. I think Tim is right, however: you get more purchase and more traction sometimes when you pin food system reform to health or to economy and growth agendas that are outwith DEFRA, because it is quite difficult for a Department of that size and type—

Q46        Rupert Lowe: It is encouraging that they have accepted their weaknesses. That is half the equation. Now we wait for more actually to deal with the problem.

Professor Lang: To echo Neil, and to accelerate it, we want detail. What can they do precisely—

Rupert Lowe: Farmers need that detail.

Professor Lang: Both Neil and I know, and I am sure you know, that farmers are getting into groups that do really imaginative things, rechanging joint land ownership into landscape management in a really imaginative way, but it is not about food production or about feeding the people in a crisis. That is my hard assessment. The creativity is there, but it is not being harnessed. It could be facilitated by DEFRA a lot more than it is at the moment. I want them to be bold, to have confidence to say that the public does want to be fed. They keep on saying that the public wants British food and isn’t getting it.

Q47        Rupert Lowe: Given your answer, we ascertained in the previous session that during covid, a lot of the private sector operators, particularly the food retailers, helped us to get over the short-term problem and did an incredibly good job. Are you worried that there is a slight conflict of interest between the retailers and the producers of our food? Arguably, they are wearing two hats: obviously, they want to see the country do well, but, equally, they have shareholders to whom they report, and they need to make profits. Do you think that is the right formula: to effectively be relying on those private sector food retailers so much, as we clearly did during covid?

Professor Lang: I dealt with that at some length in my “Just in Case” report for the National Preparedness Commission. The danger is the food retailers are so powerful: they are the gatekeepers, and they are also the choke point—they are the risk and the most vulnerable spot. In an earlier answer, Neil talked about public engagement. The public—this is my language—need to be involved in that process much more. If you look at DEFRA’s committees, such as the food strategy committee, there are no consumers on it. If you look at one of the others, there is one. It is as though the British policy reflex is just to say, “We are only concerned about supply, not about the people.” The other bit of the equation is demand. What do they want, and how? I am not even sure that “supply and demand” is the right language for dealing with resilience.

Q48        Rupert Lowe: But supply will not happen if the supermarkets are taking all the margin and leaving nothing to the producer, which is what tends to happen. As you say, they are very powerful.

Professor Lang: It is, but they would say, and with some justification, that their returns on the capital employed are actually quite small for the vast turnover that they have.

Q49        Rupert Lowe: It is more than the farmers.

Professor Lang: It is a lot more than for farmers, but they have not got the assets. The farmer has the assets, and that is the key difference. It is what keeps people on the land.

Q50        Rupert Lowe: My final question—I hate asking this, because I personally do not think there are any areas where Government actually improves things—is whether there are any areas where you think that the Government should be taking a more active role to ensure food supply resilience?

Professor Ward: Economists in the Treasury and elsewhere have an orthodoxy for where Government should be getting involved in things. Market failure and public goods are the sorts of concepts that they use. The world is not actually as simple as that, but it helps to think that way if you are an economist. The resilience of the food system is a public good, so I think that there is a legitimate case. The private sector will not necessarily just sort that out by itself, because it is driven by profit. It just will not do that. So you need some Government intervention there and a Government vision. You need to be able to have resilient targets and planning that brings citizens, food poverty groups, distributors and producers together. You need someone to convene the meetings. I think that there is a role for Government as well in agricultural policy and protecting public goods.

Q51        Rupert Lowe: Historically there has been.

Professor Ward: I saw you nodding when the farmer was saying on the previous panel that we need more Government support and help.

Professor Lang: To answer your question in a different way, although I agree with what Neil said, the role of Government in this is to be the framework and to facilitate asking what we want from that total food system. At the moment, we have—dare I say it—almost ruthless self-interest of different sectors, land being one along, and retailing as well. Another is the logistics industry, although it is actually not being taken seriously enough, yet it is the lifeblood that moves everything. I do not know why logistics is not the key industry. It should be.

Rupert Lowe: It is in the US.

Professor Lang: Yes, it is in the US. One in five trucks on British roads is food. When there is a crisis in the diesel market, wow, everything falls apart.

Following Neil, I think that the role of Government is about facilitating, being clear, banging heads together and saying that the public interest is in—to take the answer from my report—feeding people in good times and bad. It is very simple, actually. Around that, we have to do some hard stuff. We must be very clear about defending food systems—literally hard defence. Misinformation and disinformation is huge; I have just come from a huge meeting talking about that. Disinformation as a risk to food systems is a completely new phenomenon in changing food markets. So we want Government to frame. That does not mean the old arguments of nannies—call them parents, and everyone is in favour of them. It is about frameworks, facilitation and, as Neil said, calling the meeting.

Going back to the previous answer to Mr Lowe, it is about not just saying there are problems here but saying, “Here is what we want to do about it. Are you up for it or are you not?” It is about unlocking investment. There are walls of cash in the City that are being held back from making the food system more resilient. I was at a huge meeting in the City two weeks ago where that was discussed, and I was a speaker at it. We were discussing how big insurance companies and banks are awash with money, which is not being applied to developing new infrastructure for the food system to make it more resilient. Why not? I think only Government can bring that discussion together.

Professor Ward: May I come in on the role of Government? We need quite a transformational set of changes over the next 25 years. We have had big food system transformations in living memory, in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. We raised our productivity immensely. There was huge technological change and there were changes in cropping practices. That change did not happen just as a result of spontaneous activity by companies. It was orchestrated and convened through a partnership between the state, farmers and agribusiness, all working together around a unity of purpose.

We live in a different world now, but there is a lot to learn from that experience of the 1940s and 50s, when the UK drove a lot of agricultural and food system change quite successfully on its own terms. We should be thinking, “How did that work, and what made that work so well?” because we need change of that magnitude over the next 25 years to cope with the need for resilience to climate change.

Professor Lang: I agree with that completely. There is a case for imagination in Government.

Q52        Chair: Is there a sense that, in the 1940s and 50s, the memories of the second world war were very fresh? People could remember almost running out of food, whereas now they think we have got food running out of our ears, which is not necessarily the case.

Professor Lang: Consumer culture assumes that food is there 364 days a year, 24 hours a day. Look at resilience planning, the sort of meetings I have just been in—twice this week—and the shock when phones go down. One of the points my report made was that we do not know how a culture that thinks food is available in that way will respond if there is major disruption.

There is a bit of complacency about saying, “We were great in covid, weren't we?” Actually, Government were terrible in covid. They closed the hospitality sector when it was close to where people are. It needed to be better organised and used. It was people from outside Government who went to the then Government and said, “Don’t you think we ought to actually be looking at food, because you are closing down some of the workers who are in the food system?” That is why the Food Industry Resilience Forum was set up, and it was closed down. No notes were even taken about how it should be resurrected. That is complacency, to be hard about it.

We need that direction to deal with crises in the short term, but the long-term change that Neil and I am referring to requires a bit of political courage: “Dear British public, we are now in a new era. Things aren’t going to be the same. Here’s the options for what we could do.” The food industry broadly thinks like this. Talk to people privately and the stories will come out about how close things are to being completely broken up.

Q53        Chair: Isn’t part of the answer to your question about why the City is not investing in food security and farming is that successive Governments keep changing the policy? Investors need stability and certainty, and they are not getting that from their Governments.

Professor Lang: If that is true for the supply side, think how true that is for the demand side. Consumers want to have security. At one level, they have it—through their phones, or through walking in and seeing full shelves—but that is very easy to knock. We know—indeed, the food industry tells me of its experiences—how easily disrupted that is, and people go from confidence to panic very quickly.

I do not think we can turn to DEFRA to do that sort of work, but there are some of us in academia who are interested in it. To be nice to Government, having been quite critical, there is actually a really interesting bubbling up in the Resilience Academy in the Cabinet Office, as well as the two units now in DEFRA itself, where they are realising that the public are not that myth from world war two—the compliant, knowledgeable, skilled and thrifty shopper. That is not the modern shopper.

Q54        Matt Turmaine: Our previous panel suggested that you would be able to provide some good answers to this question, so I am looking forward to them. Can you give us some examples of other countries that have a really good approach to food resilience? What can we learn from them?

Professor Ward: I will get in first and then Tim can expand, because he will have more to say on this than me. For a start, it is really good that people are asking this question, because a lot of discussions about agricultural policy and food policy in the UK are quite parochial. It is really useful to be thinking, “What can we learn from elsewhere?”

Finland comes up very prominently, so I would suggest you look at Finland. There is all sorts of interesting institutional architecture there, but I think it is largely a function of the geography of that country and the Russian threat in the north. Singapore, the Netherlands, Japan and Israel—there are lots of countries that have active and assertive approaches to the resilience of their food systems. They have different types of concerns, and they will have different complexions to their strategies, but there is plenty to be learned from other countries. I am sure Tim will be able to say much more.

Professor Lang: I think you have given that breadth. Different countries have different strategies, and their motivations are different. If you go to the Netherlands, which I did for my report, it is a small country that had experience of famine in world war two. Welfare and health policy are really important in the Netherlands because of the 1944-45 famine, and you can still measure the life expectancy of Dutch women by the preconceptual care of their grandmothers—it is quite extraordinary. The threat of famine has had a very big impact, and a bit like how Finland decided to specialise in ceramics and glass, post second world war, the Netherlands chose to invest in those very fertile soils beneath the sea level. It built a culture within Government of taking food production very seriously, while Britain’s approach has been much more about avoidance.

I agree that Finland is also very good. In my experience, the closer to Russia you get, the more seriously they take this. I agree that Singapore is interesting as a city state, because it has decided to double its own production, even though it is a city state, not a big landed sovereignty. I was personally very impressed in France by how—not in the name of resilience, but in the name of rebuilding urban-rural connections—they had done some very interesting work to diversify food systems in the name of agri-food regionalism. Now that work has been of great interest and support to the French Government in the name of resilience.

At the sub-national level, I was particularly taken by the French-speaking part of Belgium: Wallonie or Wallonia, depending on what your language is. There is a city called Liège—it is like Sheffield, because it is a deindustrialised coal and steel town—and 15 years ago they essentially started to say, “What is the point of Liège?” They said, “Well, let’s run with food as a purpose. People in Liège eat food,” and they basically built a new culture. They have a big annual food festival, and they have started a new programme of regional horticultural enterprises around it.

What I did in my report was look at countries, which is why Neil was turning to me, and there are lessons we can learn from them. For me, the No. 1 is actually Sweden, which I was hinting at earlier. It has done the most astute national review of resilience and what it wants from its land. Norway is doing something very similar, so I think we can learn from the Baltics. Latvia was very interesting to me. It looked at, “What do we do if Russia rides all over us? Well, probably the Government will have collapsed, so we need to go down the levels and think about hyper-local community food resilience.” My answer to your question is: don’t just look at national Governments. We need to look below national Governments at the regional—or the sub-national, to be pompous—and at cities down to the very local.

To go back to the question Sir Geoffrey asked a quarter of an hour ago, one reason why I think Neil and I were both saying that you do need the Government to set new frameworks is that one weakness of DEFRA and the British Government system is that they do not apply food and environment strategies to the sub-national. It is all assumed to be done from Whitehall, until you go to Wales.

In Wales, there is a really interesting movement going on. It has created and appointed a food security adviser and a food strategy adviser, but it also has 22 local food partnerships covering the whole of Wales. County councils are doing interesting things in Wales. It is much more multi-level. Do not just look at what we can learn from other countries; we need to look at who is dealing with the multi-level-ness of food security resilience well. The short answer to that is, no one is doing it perfectly, but there are wonderful lessons we can draw for different levels from different countries.

To wrap that up and to try to be practical, one of the things my report suggested was that English mayors get powers. The Devolution Act needs to do for England what it has done rather unequally and differently for Scotland and Wales. We need to unleash imagination and change to be a more resilient food system. Giving mayors and unitary authorities responsibilities and powers—people like me have been arguing that that needs to come but for resilience. If you are just planning for bombs going off, shocks, disasters, floods and droughts, you invoke the Civil Contingencies Act. Call it a “resilience Act”; you would want food to be in there, in which case we need to be giving powers to different levels for different capacities. I think the metro mayors would be up for that in England, and certainly the devolved Administrations in Wales and Scotland would; Northern Ireland is slightly different.

To answer your question in one sentence, there is lots that we can learn from lots of other people, but no one has it perfect because we are all having to rethink what we have done in the last 70 years. We have created a more vulnerable food system that is more prone to shocks. We are now all having to think, what do we want for the next 30 years? We will need to look at that multi-level-ness very seriously.

Chair: Tim, thank you. We are up against the clock now. We want to finish by 6 pm.

Professor Lang: It was a big question—forgive me.

Chair: I want short questions and short answers, please.

Q55        Mr Betts: Tim, you just mentioned the issue of critical national infrastructure and the database, from which food is of course missing at present. I think you just said to us that that is an issue in itself, but that a lot more can be done as well. Should the food supply chains be part of the critical national infrastructure database, and should more be done in addition?

Professor Lang: Clive, I am going to answer you frankly: is the Pope a Catholic? Of course. It is absurd. If we make food a critical national infrastructure—which we have, and rightly so—then come a shock, within three days, you need some food. Well, actually, you can do without food for 30 days—it depends where you are—but you need water. We have things like water, electricity and food as CNIs. It clearly ought to be in the database. The NAO—I defer to your colleagues here with you, the NAO team—has that excellent bit of the Report saying that DEFRA has the database, has a benchmark and has dashboards, but they are weak; they are not enough. But should they be there? Absolutely. That is why we need clearer guidance from the Government about what we want from the food system—or, as I put it, “What’s food for?”

Mr Betts: That would then lead on to what elements should be in the database.

Professor Lang: Precisely. As I put it very clearly in my “Just in Case” report, I would like that to be not just supply or targets for production; it has to be availability, confidence and trust measures—consumer-ish measures. Again, that takes me back to the thinking behind the food Bill proposal; it is all about that. Keeping the confidence of consumers is a key indicator.

Professor Ward: I would just add a point—which is inspired by Tim’s work, actually. I do not know whether this is because of the rules, but a lot of the discussion about critical national infrastructure seems to focus on distribution centres and the cold chain—the hard, technical kit, the science and the big capital stuff. You were also told about the NFU list, which talked about abattoirs as well, which you could add, but there is institutional infrastructure as well.

There are local food groups and food partnerships; Tim mentioned 22 local food partnerships in Wales. There are organisations where people come together regularly to talk and think about this stuff. That is part of the critical national infrastructure for food. It is the institutions and food partnerships that help to distribute food, and promote growing food as well, that will play a part in the resilience of the food system in a crisis.

Professor Lang: They are kept out of it at the moment. They are operating as civil society, but they need to be in the overarching framework.

Q56        Mr Betts: Is there a responsibility, presumably for the Government, to start educating the public so that they understand some of these challenges and difficulties, and the fact that food is not just going to be there automatically? We do see some national politicians questioning whether climate change is actually a problem that needs addressing; perhaps that sometimes confuses the public on social media, when these are big issues that ought to be part of any understanding.

Professor Lang: They are. As you will probably remember, Clive, on the day that the election was called, 22 May 2024, the Government of the day launched the Prepare website. People like me were glad that it had been launched, but it is weak. Telling the 20% of the population who cannot afford to eat well, or even adequately, that they now have to spend about 500 quid preparing for shocks was not helpful. We can do better.

Shortly, the Government will launch a revision to the Prepare website. I think that is good, and we should encourage that, but just having a website is not engaging with the public. It is not—going back to Neil’s point an hour ago—involving the public or representatives of the public in DEFRA committees. We need more public involvement at the heart of what DEFRA is trying to do, or not do, with food.

It is a big question, but Neil is right: it is partly an institutional failure. We do not have a council of food and national food security; we should do. If we had something equivalent to the Climate Change Committee, we would have something giving clear, strategic, central advice to the Government. We have a few bolt-on committees that come along one moment and seem to fade a bit, but we need something put on a better footing. When you look at other countries—to go back to the earlier question—the ones that are doing interesting things for resilience and security have better institutional structures. Ours are out of date.

Professor Ward: One of the recommendations in “The Roadmap for Resilience” is that we have a co-ordinating board or committee that sits above DEFRA, perhaps through the Cabinet Office and reporting to the Prime Minister. It is easy to make these sorts of machinery of government recommendations in these sorts of reports, but I think this is a case where you have a major and complex challenge that crosses Government Departments and does not really get the co-ordinated focus that it warrants. This is an occasion where it would be quite good to have a bit of machinery of government change.

Professor Lang: Or else why have food as one of 13 CNIs? I mean, we either take it seriously or we don’t. The public take it very seriously—they want their food; but it might be different food in crises.

Q57        Rachel Gilmour: This is the last question. Both of you have previously touched on elements of what I am about to ask. You just said, and I think you are right, that a Government setting up a website saying this, that and the other is not enough; you are not drilling down as much as you need to, whether that is into local resilience forums or otherwise. And out of that falls another question: how can you ensure that vulnerable people would have access to food during a severe disruption? And out of that then falls another question: how much should be left to individual households, in terms of preparedness? So there are three tiers, if you could wrap it up, please.

Professor Lang: I am glad that Mr Turmaine pressed my button pressed earlier about different levels. This applies to consumer confidence. One of the big holes—the NAO Report did not go into this for whatever reason—is storage.

If you look at the Prepare website and, I think, from the hints that we are getting, at the replacement that will be announced shortly—Get Ready, or Play Your Part, or whatever it is called—we know that the onus is going to be on households to protect themselves. But when we interview consumers, we know that it is actually about neighbourliness and community. If we go to the community level, we know that we need something slightly bigger than that.

That is why, in answer to Mr Turmaine, I pointed to the Swedish report. The Swedes were very Swedish and said, “We cannot just say to consumers any more than, ‘Well, it is all just up to the central state to have storage.’” You have got to have different levels of storage, of different things and at different levels if you want to be serious about maintaining trust and confidence that the food will be there.

It is back to this challenge of multi-levelness and encouraging the creativity of the British public. They are amazing; British civil society is fantastic. However, as Neil was alluding to earlier, it does not have the support or indeed recognition. It is not being included enough in central Government thinking about what we want from food. That is where they told me loud and clear, for my report: “Look, we are doing sticking plaster work in food banks. What would it take for them to become community food stores?” What a thought!

What would it take for cities or towns to have town plans for which neighbourhoods can help each other? What skills would we need to spread in the population to enable better access to land? I speak to those of you who are farmers. At what point would you allow 10 acres to become an allotment? Seriously. I talked to landowners who said, “We are up for that. Why not?”

Q58        Rachel Gilmour: Why not, Rupes?

Professor Lang: There you go; you can have this internal discussion.

Rupert Lowe: I don’t think they’d grow very much—

Professor Lang: I talked to very big landowners who said, “We’d be up for that.” We need better access. You look at other cultures, to go back to Mr Turmaine’s question to me, such as the Netherlands, Sweden or France, and you see that access to land is totally different. Go to Russia—old-style Russia—and the allotments kept people alive.

Professor Ward: The “Roadmap for Resilience” report talks about three core transformations in making production more resilient, particularly to climate change but also to shocks, and to be smarter about land use. That is my point about better mapping the productive capacity of our agricultural resource to our needs better, and making healthy food more accessible and affordable. You have to do those three things together.

I do not think that we do the accessible and affordable very well, irrespective of the resilience challenge. However, if thinking about the resilience of the food system is becoming more high-profile and more prominent, that might be a way in which we can start to get a food system that delivers more broadly across the population. The Food Foundation has done really interesting work. It shows that to afford a healthy diet among the poorest families takes up 85% of their total income, just on food.

We have a problem around access to healthy food among a part of the population. Community initiatives around food—these local food partnerships—can be a vehicle to bring in all sorts of other social wellbeing improvements and deal with a range of social problems beyond the food system. It is really important to think about people on more modest incomes and more vulnerable groups.

Q59        Rachel Gilmour: It strikes me, as somebody who represents very strong communities, that we don’t have to just talk about food resilience; you can talk about communities in terms of resilience generally. I very often say our community will probably be the last thing we have.

Professor Lang: In my report, the Treasury very kindly gave me the figures on how little money is spent on the British population for civil defence. I was interested—following the Sweden, Latvia and Finland example—in getting the population engaged in general food resilience. I asked them to show me. They said in Britain we spend less than £1 per person on civil defence, out of £55 billion for the MOD.

Apply that to DEFRA’s thinking and you can say there is no civil food defence. If we put a hard, military lens into our glasses, you would say, “Well, you would want more than that.” You would want some serious money to go into helping people to protect themselves to protect the nation, if you took that framework.

The NAO Report went into that in a roundabout way, on the question of how much money we are prepared to spend on that sort of infrastructure. At the moment it is not much.

Professor Ward: It is quite interesting because it is very comfortable for people to say that the first function of a Government should be defence of the people—you hear people say that—and no one challenges it and says, “Hang on a minute, I think there should be less government.”  That is very comfortable, but having a well-fed population ought to be pretty close to that.

Professor Lang: That is where I called it; I said we have to dust down the 1930s notion of food defence. It changes the whole discourse. If you start looking at the complexity of the food systems that Neil and I and many colleagues have worked on for the last 30 or 40 years, these are acutely vulnerable chokepoints from very big powerful industries. They are vulnerable to attack.

How can we protect them? The answer is to create a slightly different food system. You go from single supplies to networks. That requires a very different economics. The notion of civil food defence is really interesting, and it is being applied by some groups in Wales now as part of the movement that is going on—with the approval of the county council. What would we do at a community level to protect ourselves?

Q60        Chair: I want to finish on that theme. I have a question for Neil. I want to quote paragraph 25 of your evidence back to you: “Responsibility for resilience should sit at the lowest effective level, while responsibility for systemic risks should sit at the national level. Major disruption exposed the limits of purely commercial approaches. Resilience should therefore be treated as a public good requiring a long-term partnership between Government, industry and civil society.” What did you actually have in mind there?

Professor Ward: I have done a lot of work on trying to make sense of how we have the agriculture and food system and land use system that we have. We take for granted its current pattern and structure, but it has actually evolved quite a lot. You can look over 200 years and there have been huge shifts, but in living memory—since the second world war—it has been through quite a profound set of changes. The changes were relatively highly planned and orchestrated by the national state, with an architecture of county agricultural committees that oversaw what constituted good farming practice in different counties. Farmers could be told to pull their socks up and sort out the rabbits, the nettles or whatever—[Interruption.] And plough more, yes. And they were graded A, B, C—it was quite interventionist.

But in that period it was a partnership between the farmers and the state and the agribusiness companies and science and technology interests in the agribusiness companies. I think we need to revisit that idea of a national system—it could even be thought of as a patriotic mission around making our food system secure and resilient. I think we need the scale of ambition for change that was evident in the post-war period.

The “public good” terminology is to appeal to the very doctrinaire economic orthodoxy about the limits of government, but I do believe that the resilience of the food system is a public good. You can’t get away from that.

Professor Lang: I agree.

Chair: Good. I was going to give you 10 seconds, but as you agree—

Rupert Lowe: Geoffrey, can I just—

Chair: No, time is up. I thank our witnesses very much indeed. You are both very busy people, and we have benefited a lot from your evidence this afternoon. We will be having officials in on Thursday and we will no doubt use some of the information and knowledge that you have given us to further probe their intentions, so thank you very much indeed.