Public Accounts Committee
Oral evidence: Resilience of the UK’s food supply to disruptions, HC 671
Thursday 15 October 2026
Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 15 October 2026.
Members present: Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (Chair); Mr Clive Betts; Anna Dixon; Rachel Gilmour; Sarah Hall; Rupert Lowe; Blake Stephenson.
Gareth Davies, Comptroller and Auditor General, National Audit Office, Rich Sullivan-Jones, Director, National Audit Office, and George Osborne, Alternate Treasury Officer of Accounts, HM Treasury, were in attendance.
Questions 61-118
Witnesses
I: Paul Kissack, Permanent Secretary, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; Emily Miles, Director General for Food, Farming and Biosecurity, DEFRA; and Helen Dallas, Interim Deputy Director, Food Preparedness and Response, DEFRA.
Report by the Comptroller and Auditor General
Resilience of the food supply chain to disruptions (HC 587)
Examination of witnesses
Witnesses: Paul Kissack, Emily Miles and Helen Dallas.
Q61 Chair: Welcome to the Public Accounts Committee on Thursday 15 October 2026. Today is the second instalment of our farming week, in which we are examining the resilience of UK food supply to disruptions.
On Monday, we heard from expert witnesses on topics such as the preparedness of the farming sector for major disruptions, as well as the Government’s engagement with food retailers, manufacturers and farmers about food supply and resilience. Today, we will explore how DEFRA and the Government are organised to improve food supply chain resilience, assess DEFRA’s preparedness for a severe supply chain disruption, and look to understand how the Department engages with industry and learns from other sectors and countries. We will also take a local angle on this issue by questioning DEFRA on the level of local and societal preparedness for food supply disruptions.
May I thank all our witnesses very much for coming? As is our usual practice, it would be helpful if you introduced yourself and said how long you have been in post.
Paul Kissack: Thank you, Chair. My name is Paul Kissack. I am the permanent secretary at DEFRA and I have been in post for almost exactly one year.
Emily Miles: I am Emily Miles, director general for food, farming and biosecurity. I have been in post for two years, and before that I ran the Food Standards Agency.
Helen Dallas: I am Helen Dallas, the deputy director for food preparedness and response. I have been in that role since April but have been working in this area for coming on for five years now.
Q62 Chair: Thank you all very much. Before I ask the first question, I should declare my interests as a practising farmer and chartered surveyor.
Paul, farming and food resilience are two sides of the same coin. In 2023, we had a major disruption to the food chain, so you had plenty of warning about what actions DEFRA needed to take to ensure the resilience of our food supply chain. This summer—this year, really—saw major problems for farmers, with a spike in input prices. We have now seen the whole debacle of the SFI, as Harry Metcalfe told us about on Monday, with five hours to get applications in. As if it was not enough for the price of fertiliser to increase by 30% to 40%, there is now a new fertiliser tax, imposed by the Government on 1 January. It does seem to me as though, in both instances, DEFRA is behind the curve. What can you do to make sure that DEFRA is more prepared for these quite seismic world events, which affect the resilience of our food and farming?
Paul Kissack: I would not recognise your characterisation of DEFRA as being behind the curve, but I absolutely recognise your characterisation of the challenges facing farming at the moment, and particularly over the last couple of years. For your assurance, nobody in DEFRA at official or ministerial level is under any illusions about how difficult it has been over the last year or two in particular for many farmers. As your witness on Monday pointed out, it varies by sector and by area of the country, but overall it is definitely the case that farmers have had a particularly difficult time over the last couple of years.
On how that plays into questions about the overall food system, perhaps I could start by offering a reflection on the Report itself, which is not about farming but about the broader food system. We absolutely recognise what the Report sets out, and I think we share its analysis almost entirely. It is very helpful and very well timed from our perspective, as we ramp up a programme of work. It sets out a food system that is extremely resilient, and probably one of the most resilient food systems in the world, in its ability to respond to some of the acute challenges it has faced over recent years, be that as a result of geopolitical events, the pandemic or the changes that came with the exit from the European Union. We have discovered that we have a very resilient food system led by the private sector. There is a role for Government, but the resilience comes from a sophisticated private sector food chain.
When it comes to farming—we absolutely recognise that domestic production underpins that food system—the Government have set out, I think unusually for Government, a clear commitment to at least maintain, and ideally grow, domestic production over the coming years. That was set out in the land use framework earlier this year and also in the farming road map, which I think is the first time a Government have set out a long-term vision for farming in quite some time. That is underpinned by sector growth plans—we are currently developing two sector growth plans around poultry and horticulture, and we published the organic farm plan yesterday. There is a lot of work going on to try to build the growth potential of the food system as a whole, both from domestic farming and from other parts of the food system, including manufacturing.
On Government funding in this area, it is worth recognising that we are now coming to the end of what has been at the very least a seven-year transition away from basic payments. Some might argue that that transition has actually been going on for decades as we have moved away from unlinked payments. Government funding to farmers is now focused broadly in two areas. One is the sustainable farming incentive and ELMs more broadly, to support farmers to move to more resilient farming. That works alongside food production, so that is good for food production and good for long-term resilience in terms of addressing some of the climate issues that you just referenced. The second type of funding is more in the innovation and technology space, to try to move to higher-productivity farming. That is how the Government now spend their money—or taxpayers’ money—on farming, rather than on the unlinked payments we had previously. That is a huge change for the sector.
As I say, we are coming to the end of that enormous change that has taken place over the last seven years. We are now seeing record levels of demand from farmers for SFI schemes—maybe we will come on to the SFI particulars you mentioned. This year, for example, we have committed close to £800 million of new funding for farmers to support them to move to more resilient systems over the coming years. That is in addition to pre-existing commitments that will be out there through ELMs and so on.
Q63 Chair: I am going to ask two quick questions before I pass over to Rachel Gilmour, who has questions on both the farming and food-resilience elements.
To stick with the farming element for a minute, I am glad that you cited the land use strategy. Savills estimates an average loss of farmland of 26,000 hectares every year since 2000. That would be more than 500,000 hectares over two decades—nearly 10%, as the land use strategy envisages. If we carry on taking that amount of land out, if we get global shocks in terms of world events, and if we get climate change, how are the Government going to maintain farming outputs as they are at the moment?
Paul Kissack: I heard you use those figures earlier in the week, and we did what good people do when they hear something and think, “Is that true?” We went back and looked at some of the data, and I think that is a UK figure rather than an England figure. As the DEFRA perm sec, I am better placed to talk about the England figure.
The amount of farmland in England is just shy of 9 million hectares. That is about 68% of the total land in England. That is by far a larger proportion of our landmass than in any comparable country. If you look at most European countries or at the States, it is much closer to about 50%. We are very unusual in having quite so much of our land under agriculture. I do not say that as a good or bad thing, just as a statement of fact. In terms of where we might have been 10 or 15 years ago, we now have 1% more land in England under agriculture than we did 15 years ago.
Q64 Chair: I would like to examine that in greater detail; we will do some work on that.
On food resilience, there has been quite a lot of criticism, as you will have seen from the NAO Report, that DEFRA has worked up some plans but has not worked them up well enough in concert with the private sector by testing them out and discussing them with the private sector. It is all very well working up plans, but if you do not have the buy-in of the people who have to operate them, they cannot be as effective as they should. What do you plan to do to change that?
Paul Kissack: That is a very fair analysis, so I completely agree with it. To clarify, the reference in the NAO Report is to our playbooks and the fact that we have not shared them. I would not share those playbooks because I do not think they will add any value for the people we would share them with. It is basically a playbook of how we stand up particular operations within the Department: how we set up teams, how we communicate with Ministers and with the press office, and so on. They are very much internal manuals for DEFRA to make sure that we are equipped to set things up fast. We similarly have a playbook on a national power outage—which we all hold in hard copy, as you can imagine—for what happens in a national power outage. They are internal manuals for how we respond quickly in the event of certain crises.
That said, the NAO is absolutely correct to identify a gap in not having a shared plan with different stakeholders for different events. We are working towards exactly that. We had a first meeting of a new food readiness group—I think it was last week or the week before—through which we are bringing together people from right across the food chain, including logistics, the cold chain, retailers, and a lot of the local responders, be they LRFs or the voluntary sector, to try to form a clearer national framework that will run through various different scenarios that we all need to collectively respond to, and to have clearer agreements on the triggers and intervention points, and the roles and responsibilities. That will be a shared plan, both in its development and in who can access it.
Q65 Chair: A final point from me—I also raised this on Monday—is about what the NFU calls, in its submission, multiple and compound threats to our food resilience. You have a major climate change problem, as we had this year, and you then get a massive disease outbreak somewhere else. In your discussions with the private sector parts of the food chain, did you discuss the whole issue of compound and several different disruptions occurring at the same time?
Paul Kissack: I have a couple of points on that. The short answer is yes—that is exactly the sort of thing we want to talk about with that group, which will meet on a regular basis.
To distinguish a bit between the different sorts of risks we face—I think the NAO Report helps a bit with this—when we say that we think the food system is pretty resilient and has demonstrated itself to be resilient, we are primarily talking about acute risks. We know it is resilient because we face a number of acute risks and we have therefore stress-tested it to real effect.
I am more worried about two different sorts of risks. One is chronic risks, the most obvious being what we are seeing in the changing climate and the more extreme weather we are facing. As I talk to farmers, that is increasingly the thing they are talking about. To be honest, they were talking about that before summer, heat waves, the droughts and the wildfires. That is a systemic challenge that we face, both in this country and globally, in respect of the changing nature of the climate and the loss of biodiversity. That is absolutely something we are focused on. To my earlier points, that is why we are investing in the environmental land management schemes to help farms to become more resilient.
The second sort of risks I worry about are what we call the catastrophic risks. They are untested. It is a good thing that they are untested—we do not want to have to face catastrophic risks—but the changing geopolitical circumstances mean they are becoming more apparent. A national power outage is a particular risk that would be very challenging not just for the food sector but for many critical national infrastructures. It is about understanding not just the compounding effect of those different risks but how you respond to different varieties of risk over time.
It is worth noting that DEFRA has moved over probably the last five years—so mainly not under my watch; it started prior to me but I have continued the process. Six years ago, when we went into the process of some of the EU exit planning and particularly the pandemic, we were not set up in the way that you might expect a national security Department to be set up, in terms of having a central professional cadre with clear lines into Cobra and the national security apparatus. We very much are now—over the last five years we have built up that capacity—and there is a particular role for that central resilience unit to deal with concurrent risks and ensure that we are moving resource and capability around the Department to do that.
Chair: I am sure other Members will wish to probe other questions. This is not totally a matter for your Department; there is an inter-dependency with other Departments and it is all to do with critical national infrastructure planning as well. I am sure Members will wish to probe that.
Q66 Rachel Gilmour: When will you actually have tangible plans and targets to support your objective to improve the resilience of the food supply chain?
Paul Kissack: We already monitor a very wide range of data on exactly that question. Every three years, as required by statute, we publish a food security report. I cannot remember which chapter it is, but I think it might be chapter 3 that is specifically about food chain resilience. That sets out a range of information. It is not targets and metrics in that sense, but it is a range of information, including data, that we track to see how we are doing on the overall state of food resilience and security in the country.
Alongside that, last year we produced the 10 “Good Food Cycle” outcomes, which are referenced in the NAO Report. One of the criticisms we have faced is that we have not produced metrics underpinning those. We are in the process of producing those metrics, and I expect us to be putting them out relatively early next year, all being well. Of course, there is a range of other public data and statistics that come out—further statistics came out today—which we can put together and use to judge the overall resilience of the system.
I do not think there is a single metric you can use. The NAO Report includes the production-to-supply ratio. That is quite a useful metric, but if I am honest, I do not think it is that useful a metric when we are talking about food security and resilience; it has quite a lot of flaws. It needs to be used alongside quite a lot of other things, so that we have a basket that we can assess.
Q67 Rachel Gilmour: I do not know whether you picked up on the news on Monday of a severe problem in France, where refrigerators were hacked and the temperatures were increased, which of course had disastrous outcomes. With that sort of thing in mind, where have you got to with the planned update to your departmental outcomes framework? Do you have anything that reflects complex hacking and incidents like that?
Paul Kissack: If I may, I will hand over to Helen to say a bit more about the work we are doing on cyber specifically. The case on Monday was interesting. I do worry about cyber. When I think about the things I worry about most, I worry about the chronic changes around climate, I worry about things like a national power outage as a catastrophic but hopefully very low risk, and I worry a lot about cyber.
The reason I particularly worry about cyber is that the risks are getting greater and the focus on critical national infrastructure is getting greater, as the chief exec of the National Cyber Security Centre has set out publicly. Aspects of the food system, from farm to fork, are connected to the internet to a degree that people are not necessarily au fait with. Who would have thought that French fridges would be the subject of a cyber-attack? There are lots of areas that could be susceptible to that kind of attack.
One of the characteristics that makes the food system as a whole quite different from some other critical national infrastructure systems is that it is very dispersed. Unlike the energy sector, which has a relatively small number of big critical assets, or the transport sector, where you can talk about airports and so on, it is very dispersed; there are tens of thousands of firms out there. To some degree that is a vulnerability, because you would have to guarantee the cyber-security of all those tens of thousands of firms. On the other hand, it is a strength, because if one of those firms goes down, there are substitute firms that will step in. Even recently, when we saw a couple of supermarkets subjected to cyber-attacks, the overall food supply for the country was fine.
Nevertheless, the growing level of risk is something that I am concerned about. A couple of years ago, we would not have had a particularly strong understanding within the Department about the cyber-security risks facing the sector, but since then we have made quite a lot of progress. Let me hand over to Helen to say a bit more.
Helen Dallas: We obviously learned a lot from the attacks on the retailers last year. One of the key things is the relationships across Government—with the National Cyber Security Centre, across the Cabinet Office and with us, too—that need to step into place when those sorts of attacks happen. We have been doing a lot of more intensive work at the retail end of the supply chain, including some benchmarking exercises on what their cyber-security levels are looking like and using the cyber assessment framework, which is a National Cyber Security Centre tool.
Because, as Paul says, there are tens of thousands of businesses, getting that intensive reach is incredibly difficult—well, it is not possible—so we also have things like the PAS 96 guidance, which has the title “Food Defence – Protection and Prevention from Deliberate Acts”. That provides a wealth of guidance to businesses, mostly aimed at SMEs, about how to protect themselves against these things. The French supermarket attack is a really good example: when we heard that news, we quickly stepped up the National Cyber Security Centre and were in touch with our retailers and checking with our stakeholders to see whether there were any impacts here.
Rachel Gilmour: So there was a lot going on behind the scenes when this happened.
Helen Dallas: Absolutely—always.
Q68 Chair: One of the Committee’s continuing themes is that the Government have an awful lot of legacy equipment. DEFRA has a lot of it, including in its ALBs. They are much more susceptible to cyber-attacks. Is it a real priority for DEFRA to do something about that?
Paul Kissack: For its own systems?
Chair: Yes.
Paul Kissack: Yes, it is. Cyber is always at the top of the Department’s risk register. There are one or two other things there as well, like the current position of the Weybridge site—the National Biosecurity Centre site—but cyber-security is basically at the top of the list, and we devote quite a lot of time to it as an executive committee, to understand where we have got to in terms of our overall position.
You are right that we have a very large legacy stack. The NAO identified a few years ago that we had what I think was the second largest legacy stack in Whitehall—I have always wondered who has the largest. We thought that about 300 applications in that legacy stack were potentially vulnerable. We have remediated over 200 of them, and we continue to work through that, so we are in a much stronger place now.
There is also quite a strong cross-Government drive, now led out of DCMS, to ensure that all Departments are applying a clear framework that regularly tests our cyber-security. Within the Department, we have also identified a small set of business-critical systems on which we want to do even more work just to double-check their cyber-security.
The biggest cyber-security challenges, both for a Department like ours and for the sector, are sometimes not the most sophisticated cyber-attacks but the relatively unsophisticated ones, as well as human behaviour in large organisations that makes them open. Some of this is also about training our staff to guard against that.
Q69 Rupert Lowe: I should declare, like you, Sir Geoffrey, that I have been an active farmer in the Cotswolds for 40 years, with arable and sheep operations.
Paul, you mentioned the SFI. I am one of the farmers who missed out from the bugger’s muddle, as I would describe it, of your opening and closing of the window within less than a day. Large numbers of farmers missed out, and they do not know what is happening now. You underspent your critical agricultural budget by over £350 million across consecutive cycles, while cutting direct support to farmers. I think most farmers would like to know fairly quickly what you will do to put right the fact that a lot of people did not get into that short-term window. The first question I want to ask is whether you think farming and food production and resilience is a long-term or a short-term project.
Paul Kissack: It is a long-term project, and a more long-term project than in most industries that we would talk about.
Q70 Rupert Lowe: Right, so do you think that opening and shutting a window for farmers to do long-term planning in less than a day, turning it into a complete charade, is a good indication of long-term planning?
Paul Kissack: The long-term aspect comes from the length of the agreements that people secure, which are a minimum of three years in the case of SFI and up to five years, or indeed 20 years, when it comes to the higher tiers.
Q71 Rupert Lowe: That is a different answer. Do you think that opening and closing a window for long-term grant applications based on long-term planning is good management?
Paul Kissack: Let me take a step back—
Rupert Lowe: Do you think that is good management?
Paul Kissack: I recognise that the window has caused huge levels of irritation, frustration, anger and stress, even for some of the people who managed to get an agreement. I completely recognise that.
Rupert Lowe: So how do they plan?
Paul Kissack: The scenario facing the Department is that we have gone from a world where, three years ago, we would open an SFI window and very few farmers would come forward seeking SFI agreements, to a world where the opposite happens: we open a window and the demand from farmers far exceeds the finite sum of money that we have to pay them. We need to work out what we do in that scenario.
We did various things in SFI26 to try to mitigate that risk. The first thing we did was to open a window, which was available to small farmers only, to give them privileged access, and to those who had no standing ELM agreement. That window, which went live sometime in the summer, worked very well and was very orderly. We made £70 million available and I think we spent £67 million before, basically, the demand ran out.
We knew, going into window 2, that demand was going to outstrip the available resources. At the beginning, in about August, the amount of money available in that pot for SFI window 2 was about £180 million. The Prime Minister, having visited farms over the summer and seen some drought, added £50 million into the pot. We subsequently added a further £20 million and, finally, the £3 million that had not been spent, so we had increased the pot by 40% in the weeks leading up to the window. Even that was not enough. When it opened, the level of demand from farmers far exceeded the amount of money available.
Rupert Lowe: You must have known that. You underspent the budget—
Paul Kissack: Of course we were expecting that level of demand—
Q72 Rupert Lowe: Look, I don’t want to go down a rabbit hole. I asked you the question, and I think in most people’s view, that is not good management. We will just park that for now.
What I want to go on to, because the Committee is very concerned about this, is the long-term resilience of food. In covid, the private sector largely dealt with the issue, not the Government. I was quite concerned when I when I read: “Defra is less confident about the ability of businesses to withstand shocks without government intervention in the next five to 10 years because of increasing risks and the potential for more severe disruptions.” That, to me, says it all, because I disagree with you when you say that you are not behind the curve—I think DEFRA is massively behind the curve. If you will indulge me, I will go through why I think you have systemically weakened our food production and our entire food distribution—our machinery, distribution chains—basically everything that we rely on for a long-term plan for food resilience, which on an overpopulated island is crucial.
The British countryside is in a state of manufactured crisis—decades of top-down eco-bureaucracy, ideological tax rates, structural underfunding and urban-biased planning laws, which have pushed our foundational rural economies to the brink of collapse. That is my view. Farmers have been let down repeatedly, financially and culturally, by DEFRA’s poor administration, with decades of chaotic mismanagement under successive Secretaries of State. Global events such as those in Ukraine and Iran have caused massive spikes in energy, fuel and fertiliser prices. As a result, the UK’s food industry and our food security and supply chain are fractured. That is where I think it is.
I look at what you have done over my 40 years in farming. Most recently, the APR issue for agricultural land will dissuade people from investing in farms, as will BPR for small businesses. Yesterday, we had fertiliser tax on top of massive increases in fertiliser prices. Staff continuity and ability at DEFRA are appalling, and I have had first-hand experience of that. We have had the banning of sprays such as pyrethroids and fungicides, as well as tinkering with seed dressings, but no addressing of the supermarket oligopolies. Planning complexities have been stopping diversification. Energy costs, as a result of net zero, are now the highest in the world. We have a weakening supply chain, basically as a result of a lack of profitability. We have an ageing workforce in farming, as you know, at about 63 years of age on average—not an ideal situation if you are looking for long-term security. The health and safety mafia have caused endless problems, and farmers are going bust.
In your road map, which I have had a look at, you mention “resilience” 15 times more often than you mention income, profit, prices and so on. I am afraid that it is just verbal baby food. I look at things like this and I think, “What on earth does that mean? Not much to me.” I think, Paul, that this is a systemic problem. When you go into a company that has a cultural problem, you have to change the culture, so do you think you need to change the culture at DEFRA? That is my question, as an elected MP and someone who is concerned about Britain’s food resilience.
Paul Kissack: I am always open to feedback on how the Department is doing—
Rupert Lowe: What do you think?
Paul Kissack: I think the Department is getting an enormous number of things right, and there are various things that I would like to improve. That is always to be the case in a large, complex organisation that trying to deliver difficult things.
To talk about the SFI for a minute from an administrative perspective, we could have been sat here in a world in which the system fell over because the RPA could not administer it, but we are not. We are in a world in which the RPA administered a new application every two seconds during that window. That is an extraordinary achievement by the people in that organisation. So do I think they are broken? No, I do not. I think they are administering things in extraordinarily difficult circumstances.
When it comes to the overall state of farming in this country, it is worth remembering that the domestic production of food in this country across most sectors is going up, and has been over 10 years. The supply ratio, which I referenced earlier and is in the NAO Report, has been stable for about 20 years. We are producing in this country about 60% of the food that we eat. That is twice as much as we were producing before the second world war.
British farming continues to be a success story, and we should be proud of it. There is a role for DEFRA in supporting it through the incredibly difficult circumstances at the moment, which are playing out on the ground through extreme weather and drought. That is what we are focused on doing, through investing in environmental land management, which farmers want—it turns out that they want more than we can afford to pay for—and through paying them through innovation grants and other productivity grants to move to robotics and more precision farming. That is what we are doing to try to help modernise the farming sector. We are putting more money into the sector than ever before as a result of the spending review settlement.
Q73 Rupert Lowe: I couldn’t disagree more, and I think that if you had a poll of farmers, they would agree with me, not with what you just said. I think you are deluding yourself if you say that you have got it right now. You have not been getting it right during my time in farming. I have watched the state undermine farming. The question is: are you turning farmers into gardeners? Is that what you are trying to do? In Monday’s hearing, you heard Harry say that he has to take a risk planting crops now. He is being encouraged not to plant food, grow crops or do the vocational things that a farmer is designed to do.
Paul Kissack: The sustainable farming incentive is specifically designed—
Rupert Lowe: But do you—
Chair: Hang on, Rupert. Let the permanent secretary answer, please.
Paul Kissack: The sustainable farming incentive is specifically designed to work alongside food production. If anything, I would say that under this Government there has been a shift in emphasis around SFI and ELMs towards more support for food production to make sure the schemes that we run work alongside food production.
Actually, the future of food production on these farms depends on the quality of the soils and the quality of the water—the things that we are investing in now. That demonstrates a seriousness about the long-term future of resilience and profitable farming.
Rupert Lowe: I’m done, Geoffrey. I am done.
Q74 Chair: You heard Harry in our session on Monday. I have quarterly meetings with my farmers. I have been doing that for the 34 years for which I have been a Member of Parliament, and I have never before heard those farmers say that they are thinking about whether they should plant crops or not because, when they plant, they do not know whether they will make a profit. That shows to me a pretty downcast industry.
Added to that, whatever you think—you put a gloss on it—the management of the SFI was appalling. It is self-defeating, because some of my farmers who had SFI or its predecessor schemes, and who now have not got it, will plough up all the environmental benefits that have been gained by this country over 20 or 30 years of subsidy. That seems ultimately self-defeating.
Add to that the fertiliser tax, which I referred to earlier. If you, as a Ministry, having seen the huge spike in fertiliser prices—most farmers, whatever they farm, require fertiliser to a greater or lesser degree—actually impose a fertiliser tax on 1 February, you cannot say that you are really considering the future of agriculture. Otherwise, you would have altered and amended both those factors.
Rachel Gilmour: You must be able to take things like the geopolitical changes into consideration. Fertiliser is going up in price because of what is happening in the middle east and, as Sir Geoffrey says, you are adding an additional burden on to farmers. Farmers on Exmoor in my constituency, who are some of most resilient in the country, are absolutely on their knees. The SFI thing was just a disgrace.
Chair: Okay; you have got the flavour of the Committee.
Paul Kissack: I have got the flavour of the Committee. I just want to say what I am accountable for and what I am not. I am not accountable for tax policy, because I am not accountable for policy, and I am not accountable for tax—that sits with the Treasury.
Chair: Let me stop you there. I was thinking that, but did you make any representations to the Treasury to delay this tax?
Paul Kissack: I obviously cannot talk about what representations we might make within Government between different Departments, but suffice to say, whether it is about fertiliser, the fuel costs that have gone up or any of the other things that happened when the middle east crisis hit—some of the witnesses in your session earlier in the week were talking about that—our Ministers are involved in cross-Government conversations about how we could spend taxpayers’ money to support different sectors. We are always involved in those conversations. There are difficult judgments that Ministers have to reach within them. I cannot get into the detail of individual sectors. I am not here to respond to questions on tax policy; that is not what I am here to do. I am happy to respond on the SFI.
Q75 Chair: Okay, let’s leave the tax, but the SFI is certainly a fact. Some of the environmental benefit that this country has had for 20 or 30 years from taxpayer subsidies is now going to be completely destroyed because that land will ploughed up. That is surely not a very sensible continuous long-term policy, is it?
Paul Kissack: I agree with you; that worries me. I am not here to try to put a positive gloss on the SFI. I absolutely appreciate the level of frustration and indeed anger that is out there, and so do our Ministers. I am simply trying to explain the cause of that. The budget available to my Department is not sufficient to pay all the farmers who wish now to do environmental land actions. If the Committee has a suggestion as to what I do about that, I am all ears, but I have to administer the budget I have. It has always been administered on a first come, first served basis. That has been the approach taken through multiple SFIs. Inherently, that is not an unfair way of doing it. When you get into the scenario we are now in, where the demand for SFI so far exceeds the potential budget, it is right that we look again at whether there is a different way of doing that. Ministers have signalled that that is their intention. The fundamental challenge we have is that I can only administer the budget I have.
Q76 Chair: I understand that. Just as a comment rather than a question on the SFI issue, to my mind and the farming industry’s view it was entirely predictable, because of the economic situation that farmers now find themselves in. It was entirely predictable, and therefore I think you should have been able to think about it and do something different rather than have the chaos that ensued.
Paul Kissack: I think we did. We increased the budget by 40% in the final weeks before. We found every bit of money we could to put into that budget. That is probably the most effective thing we could have done. We capped payments as well, so that we could stretch the available money to more farmers. Previously, a quarter of all SFI funding went to just 4% of farmers. That is why we introduced a cap, so that the money could be spread across more farmers than was previously the case.
We supported farmers as far as we possibly could by providing much more simple guidance in the run-in to the window, so that people were prepared. We actually reduced the number of actions available in order to simplify it. We took numerous actions and then we ran a first window, so that small farms and those who were not in ELM schemes could access it. That was a very orderly window. We took a number of actions for exactly the reasons you are suggesting, in anticipation of the excess demand. There are only a certain amount of actions that we can take to smooth that out.
Chair: Thank you for that. I am sure the industry will want to reflect on that reply, so thank you very much. Let us move on to Clive Betts, my excellent deputy.
Q77 Mr Betts: The supply chain is clearly very important, but it is a very complicated chain with lots of businesses. Engagement with those businesses and involving them in the process and preparedness is really important. The feedback in the Report is that it got quite good during covid, where there was a real need for that to happen, and then it has sort of dropped off since. There has not been as much engagement, and the various committees and working groups that were set up do not meet as often as they did. Do you recognise the need for improvement in that?
Paul Kissack: This was probably the one bit of the Report where I did not quite recognise the critique. I know it is not coming from the NAO; it is coming from stakeholders. Either way, we would take very seriously the idea that in some way we have stepped back from engagement with the sector.
There is a specific question about one forum that we used to run during covid, which was very highly regarded: the food resilience industry forum. That was set up with, I think, over 150 organisations to help manage the crisis. To Mr Lowe’s point, it was a co-ordination mechanism. The leadership was coming from businesses. They were the ones solving the problems, but they were coming to the Government and saying, “If you could fix this issue—road haulier hours or an issue in the Competition Act—it will help us.” We were in a convening and response role. That was very popular with the industry. We shut it down because it was a response mechanism to a particular crisis. In effect, it still exists. We can stand it up very quickly. It is all there ready to be stood up if we need it. Thankfully, we have not needed to, so it is a sort of success factor.
We have a whole range of different fora that we usually run on a quarterly basis. Some of those are run by officials and some of them are ministerial-chaired, including the food strategy advisory board and the farming and food partnership board. I attended a number of the ones that Ministers run. They will talk about issues of resilience, but they will not necessarily be specifically focused—they are not resilience forums, if that makes sense. If you are talking at the farming and food partnership board about opportunities for sector growth, you are talking about the resilience of the farming sector, but you are not necessarily having the kind of conversation that the NAO invites around specific events.
We have set up a new forum to address that, which is the food readiness group that I referenced earlier. That brings together people from right across the food chain and adds in local resilience forums, the voluntary sector and other Government Departments, with a view to developing a plan. That is both forward-looking, rather than reactive, and specifically focused on resilience.
Q78 Mr Betts: You have plans and structures in place and then you look at the issue of disruption and how you might respond to it. The complaint identified in the Report was that businesses have not been involved in preparing those plans. Is that a fair comment?
Paul Kissack: This goes back to the question the Chair raised earlier, which I think was specifically about the playbook, our internal manual. We have a set of playbooks on how DEFRA works internally, but it is absolutely fair to say that we do not have a single overarching framework or plan that sets out the roles and responsibilities for every part of the system. That is the piece of work that we have begun, and we will use the food readiness group to help us develop that. We will work on that over the coming months.
Q79 Mr Betts: Will that also look at the exercises you do to test resilience? Again, businesses have said that they have not really been involved in those exercises. If the exercises are going to be meaningful, clearly it is absolutely key that those who will be at the sharp end of responding to any crises should be engaged in them.
Paul Kissack: I totally agree. I will bring Helen in to say a bit more, but I think that over the last four years the food resilience team has been engaged with about seven different exercises—four around cyber-security, and three others. We definitely take the approach that exercising is absolutely critical to testing the plans that we have. That is very much policy across the whole of Government. It is right that industry have not always been involved, but they have been involved in some. The farming industry have been involved in a few more than is suggested in the Report, which is about the food sector, if that makes sense. We also learn from actual ongoing crises. Over the summer, we have obviously been dealing with the middle east, droughts, wildfires and so on, so we do lessons learned around that. I do not know if Helen wants to add a bit more on exercising.
Helen Dallas: Absolutely. As Paul says, over recent years, we have done seven exercises. One of them was really notable; one of the cyber exercises was about a cyber-incident in retail, and we invited retailers in to join that exercise. How we do that has always been incredibly challenging, because they are all in competition with each other, so we cannot all sit around the same table and have a discussion about how one retailer would respond in front of the other retailer without getting into those blurry lines around competition law and what their approaches would be. In this one we found a fantastic format that worked, where they had their own space to discuss within their own business what they would be doing, and we could come together as a group to discuss the bits that were appropriate to discuss together.
Direct involvement is not the only way that this happens. We have engaged with industry ahead of some exercises to say, “This is the scenario. How would you approach this? What do you think you would be doing?”, so that we can feed that into the exercise. It is important to note that actually dealing with incidents is also how we learn, and that can be just as powerful as exercises themselves—of course, industry is involved with those.
Q80 Mr Betts: Is that an improvement on what we were told in the Report?
Helen Dallas: The exercise that I referred to, where the retailers were involved, is the one that is mentioned in the Report as the key one where the food sector were involved. We were already discussing with industry ahead of exercises without involving them in the actual exercises, and we completely acknowledge the suggestion in the NAO Report that we need to do this more.
The food group that met last week did a workshop on a national power outage scenario, where we did quite a desk-based exercise of “What could we be doing? How can we tackle the problems in this particular scenario?” That is something we will also be taking forward. We will involve that group in proper exercising, but also do desk-based scenarios with them.
Mr Betts: Is that an improvement on what was referred to in the Report?
Helen Dallas: Yes, absolutely.
Q81 Mr Betts: Let us move on to lessons learned from elsewhere. We tend to take the very narrow view that we can do it all and learn all our lessons, but other countries obviously have similar problems. You came on to the issue of the food supply chain and supermarkets, and the problems they had in France the other day. How far are you learning from what other countries do? Are there examples where they are already doing it better, from which we can learn?
Paul Kissack: I might come to you, Helen, to answer in more detail, but overall we do learn quite a bit from other countries. We are part of a NATO panel in this area, so we discuss regularly with allies their approaches to food security and resilience. It is fair to say that, as we develop the new framework that I have been describing through this food preparedness group, we will want to look at different international examples we might be able to learn from.
A couple of examples that come up quite a lot are perhaps worth talking about. One is stockpiling. It is sometimes asked why the Government do not have a central food or grain stockpile. We used to as a country, but I think we ceased to sometime in the 1990s. There is no in-principle objection to the UK Government having stockpiles; indeed, we have them in certain other areas, such as critical minerals or medical supplies.
It basically comes down to a value-for-money judgment. Ministers across Government and within DEFRA thinking about the food system will have a range of options for spending taxpayers’ money to try to improve its resilience, and it is not clear that a national food stockpile would be the most value-for-money way of doing so. That is not to rule it out for all time, but it is not clear that it would represent value for money for the UK in the way that it does for some countries because of their particular circumstances and geography.
The other thing that people sometimes point to, where I am more sympathetic to learning the lessons, is household readiness, where there is a greater focus on communication and perhaps a different social norm and culture around being prepared for different events. We are working with the Cabinet Office on a new readiness campaign that I expect will be rolled out in due course, asking people to take sensible steps like having bottled water and non-perishable food in the house so that they can cope, particularly in the more catastrophic events we are talking about—which hopefully will never happen—such as a national power outage. Do you have enough food in the house to get you through a few days? Things like that. Other countries tend to have more deliberate approaches than we have had traditionally. We do have an approach in the Prepare website, but we know that awareness and use of it is very low.
Q82 Mr Betts: We will come to that later, but let me pick up on it for a second since you raised it. How do you deal with families who are wondering how they will pay for tomorrow’s food, let alone how they will store food for two or three weeks in an emergency?
Paul Kissack: It is a really important question. There are a couple of things. One is that not all the ways households can prepare require cost. Some advice that I think will come out is already on the Prepare website: cost-free things, such as knowing where your torch is if you have one and bringing those things together. I lived in New Zealand for a few years, and it was absolutely common for everybody to have a grab bag in case of an earthquake or a tsunami. Luckily, we do not face those kinds of things, but there is something about having a culture where people just know where things are. When it comes to food and water, the message really is, “Do it if you can.” For those who can afford it, it is a good thing to do for everybody else, because if there is some kind of event, you can look after yourself for a few days, allowing emergency responders to respond to those who cannot.
Q83 Mr Betts: When you are talking to households and pitching a scenario to them, will you also be talking to organisations such as food banks, particularly the national ones, about how they can help in those situations?
Paul Kissack: Absolutely. We did a bit of a workshop last week on a national power outage, and we talked to a national charity with a reach into some 8,000 communities and organisations about exactly this question: how do you get food to people in the event of catastrophic failure? Going back to one of the lessons we learned from covid, the existing private sector system is incredibly effective at responding to acute crises and getting food to the community level, but it is not as strong in knowing how to get it to the final mile. We can get it to stores, but how do you get it to households? That is where the Government did play a role supporting voluntary and community groups and others to make sure that food got to households at that level. It is very much part of the conversation we want to have through this group.
Q84 Mr Betts: You mentioned that there is perhaps more awareness in other sectors, such as energy, of the need to have a resilience plan. Are you learning any lessons from them about how they go about it? We recognise that they are much more regulated and perhaps there are more powers with the regulator to organise the industry than there is in food.
Paul Kissack: One thing that the Cobra unit does at the Cabinet Office is bring together lessons across the different 13 critical national infrastructures. One thing we find in those lessons to some degree is that food is a bit of an outlier because it is, unusually for a CNI, all essentially within the private sector and is very dispersed across a large number of organisations. That creates a bit of a challenge for us sometimes in docking into the Cobra systems. That is reflected in one of the comments that the NAO picks up in the Report from our own self-assessment around our CNI capabilities.
However, that does not stop us looking at those lessons. On your question about regulatory powers, in essence, we, as the Government, do not hold a set of resilience powers over the food sector. There are various regulations that the food sector has to respond to, around everything from health and safety and labour laws to food standards and so on, but there are not a set of resilience standards in the way that there are for the energy or water sector and so on. That is one of the questions that the NAO Report raises: is that right and should there be standards? Should there be a set of powers that Government hold over the food sector if there is a catastrophic event?
Our sense of that is that, as we have gone through quite a series of acute events, we have not felt the need to reach for a particular lever. There are things that we have done through the legal system that have provided additional flexibilities in those circumstances, as I mentioned earlier. However, it is not inconceivable that you could have an event so catastrophic that the Government would need to reach for a lever. It is at least sensible for us to be looking at that. I just think that we need to make sure we can advise Ministers when the time comes. We have got to set a reasonably high bar for a new regulatory imposition on the food sector. It has to be justified by whatever the event is that we are looking at. Last time I was before the Committee, I was being held to account for how much we regulate and whether we can simplify and lighten regulations. There is a constant challenge to get that right.
Q85 Mr Betts: Would you be looking for a regulation that you could bring in as and when it is needed, rather than one that applied all the time?
Paul Kissack: Potentially. I do not want to speculate too much on what are essentially policy options, which ultimately would be a decision for Parliament, let alone Ministers. I do not think that, when we look at the recent history of the food sector going through various events, we have felt “You know what, if we had the following big regulatory lever, we would have used it.” Businesses have responded brilliantly to these changing circumstances.
However, you could imagine a world where, in a national power outage, Government intervention needed to be far greater for some reason, and we would want to know that we had the legal basis for doing that. We always have the backstop of the Civil Contingencies Act. If we were in an extreme circumstance, that Act would probably give us—as the NAO Report touches on—the legislative framework that we needed.
Q86 Chair: I want to follow up on an earlier question with you, Helen. We need to consider the food sector as a holistic whole. We have spent a lot of time today talking about farming as the primary producers. You then go on to how you transport goods from the farm and within the food chain sector and then to processing in one form or another, be it mills, slaughterhouses and so on. That is a problem in itself in that more and more of our food processing is being done outside this country, which is a systemic risk. Then you go on to the retailers. When you consult with industry, will you be sure to consult with all those different parts?
Helen Dallas: Absolutely. It has been important in the setting up of this food group to make sure that we have representation from end to end. It goes all the way from farming through to hospitality. We want the group to be able to have really strong operational conversations, so we did not want it to be too big, which has been an incredible challenge because of the size of the sector. Trade associations can represent their part of the supply chain, but they represent the entire supply chain. I completely agree with you; everything has to work together.
Paul Kissack: Just to add, we had the NFU, the cold chain, logistics, retailers, the voluntary sector and LRFs in the room.
Q87 Chair: To follow up on your emergency legislation, during covid Parliament obtained pretty strong powers pretty quickly from the Civil Contingencies Act 2004. If you needed any particular powers, you could use that mechanism, which would be more specific to the individual risk, as it was with the Coronavirus Act 2020, rather than having blanket legislation now that may not fit the individual emergency.
Paul Kissack: Yes.
Chair: Good—we are in agreement!
Q88 Rachel Gilmour: Are you now saying that your playbook has the right amount of operational detail to respond to a severe food supply disruption? That was not the suggestion of the NAO Report. Are you now saying categorically that you have the operational detail?
Paul Kissack: No, we are talking about slightly different things. It is worth setting the playbook to one side. The playbook is just an internal DEFRA document.
Rachel Gilmour: You said that earlier.
Paul Kissack: What we are talking about developing is the sort of plan the NAO is suggesting that we develop. That will set out the operational detail and the roles and responsibilities of different parts of the sector in order that we can respond to different scenarios that may play out, if that makes sense.
The short answer is no. We would not sit here and say that we have all that detail laid out. When I talk to people who were involved in the pandemic response within DEFRA, which I was not, they say, “It worked really well, but we could do with codifying some of it. We were making it up as we went along. We are pretty confident we’d be able to do it again, but can we write it down so that we are all really clear what we are doing?” That does not feel beyond the realms of possibility to me.
Rachel Gilmour: You don’t want to reinvent the wheel. If the wheel is already there, you use the wheel again.
Paul Kissack: Correct.
Q89 Rachel Gilmour: You are now talking about having done a detailed national plan for food supply in the event of a national power outages, or at least having a discussion about one. You were urged to do that in 2023. Are you now saying that you have done that, or is it part of an ongoing plan of action?
Paul Kissack: It is part of ongoing work. We have done quite a lot of work since the Mighty Oak exercise a couple of years ago. We are focusing our efforts in three areas within DEFRA. The first is household preparedness. We talked about that issue earlier. It is one of the most effective things to build resilience not just in the food system, but nationally within communities. The second is how we would get food to the most vulnerable, which picks up Mr Betts’ point as well. The third is recovery after a power outage and how we get the food chain up and running as quickly and as close to normal as possible. We are taking a fairly proportionate, focused approach in the work. Those are our three priorities at the moment.
Q90 Rachel Gilmour: Has the work you are doing on the plan been independently assured? Has somebody been asked to have a look and say, “That’s really good,” “No, you’ve forgotten this,” or, “You haven’t put that in”?
Helen Dallas: That is in our plan; we are going to have it independently assured. We are going to get somebody external—probably more than one person—to test it. We will also run the actual process of doing it by various parts of industry and the local tier to test it, but there will be an official external independent assurance process.
Q91 Rachel Gilmour: To go back to the point the Chairman just made, will that independent assurance take into account the numerous sectors that need to be there to assure?
Helen Dallas: Absolutely. A key part of our programme of work is recognising that we need a whole-of-society approach to deal with these issues. No one part of the sector, nor Government alone, can deal with this. It needs to be a whole-of-society approach.
Q92 Rachel Gilmour: Will the Government’s database of critical national infrastructure assets include key food supply chain assets?
Paul Kissack: The short answer is yes. At the moment, the food system, as a system, is on the database that you are referring to—the Cabinet Office knowledge base of critical national infrastructure. This comes back to my earlier point that some of the ways in which we think about critical national infrastructure across Government do not fit brilliantly with a food system that is so dispersed.
As a starting point, the system, at system level, is on there. We have learned a huge amount about different aspects of the supply chain over recent years, partly because you go through these events and you have to learn pretty fast. We are now trying to identify individual assets from within the food supply chain that would go into the knowledge base as individual assets. I am not allowed to talk about what those assets are because they are tentative.
Q93 Rachel Gilmour: Okay. So you have not done it yet but you are doing it.
Paul Kissack: We are part-way through it.
Rachel Gilmour: So you have learned your lesson from previous events and you are using that information and knowledge to make things better in future.
Paul Kissack: Correct.
Q94 Rachel Gilmour: Is there a timescale?
Helen Dallas: There are different phases to the work. There are some easier parts where there are obvious assets that will need to go on there. We should have completed that in about the next four months. Then there is a longer piece of work, because of the complexity of the supply chain. We are looking at a set of products that you would still want to be available in extreme crisis, and we are tracking them through the supply chains to work out what parts need to be on the database in order to make that true. That is a much longer piece of work, as it is incredibly complex. For that, we are aiming for March 2028.
Rachel Gilmour: So it will be completed by March 2028.
Helen Dallas: Yes, and then it will need to be constantly kept up to date.
Rachel Gilmour: Obviously. So in 18 months’ time, you will have nailed it.
Helen Dallas: Yes.
Q95 Chair: Perhaps we will have you back then to see how you are getting on. Interestingly, I see there is currently an urgent question on the sustainable farming incentive. It will be interesting to see whether your Minister says the same thing as you said, permanent secretary.
Paul Kissack: It will be interesting for both of us.
Rachel Gilmour: To be fair, she has already indicated that she will look at how they do the payments, so I am holding her to account.
Chair: Excellent. I am going to take a short break now. The clock is at 11.02 am. Please be back by 11.10 sharp, because I will try to finish around midday if we possibly can.
Sitting suspended.
On resuming—
Chair: We will recommence with Clive Betts.
Q96 Mr Betts: Permanent secretary, I want to follow on with the issue of families who are strapped for cash, and how they would deal with getting themselves resilient for any significant disruption in their food supplies.
When I asked you before, we talked about poorer families, and particularly their reliance on food banks and what you could do there. Some research has indicated that, to have a resilient package of food in the house, families would have to spend about £500, which is more than many spend on a month’s supply of food and not something they can go out and buy tomorrow at the supermarket.
Have you got a plan whereby you can fund food banks and get food to them in a crisis, probably with the help of supermarkets, to help the poorest families, who will otherwise have no food at all and cannot put those stocks in place in advance?
Paul Kissack: To clarify, I do not think I was suggesting that we would expect people to rely on food banks in that scenario. I am not sure if that is what you were saying to me.
We are working with the voluntary sector, and we had an initial conversation at the food preparedness group last week—a bit of a workshop on how we would get food to vulnerable groups, which may well include those on lower incomes. We do not have a clear plan in place at the moment on that, but that is the work we are trying to do through the food preparedness group. It is a work in progress.
Does the Government expect low-income families to spend a lot of money buying food? In essence, no. The ask is that those who can should build up their food, and indeed bottled water, because that helps the wider societal response.
Q97 Mr Betts: Who would co-ordinate that at local level? One of the lessons we learned from covid was that organising at a local level is a lot better than national telephone banks and things that often did not work.
Paul Kissack: I completely agree. I might ask Helen to come in again, but I have a couple of thoughts. The first is that one of the principles in the Amber Book, which is the Government’s overall approach to responding to emergencies, is subsidiarity: responses are better done at the local level where possible.
One of the issues raised in the NAO Report is about LRFs, which, as we know, vary in terms of capacity and capability and have not necessarily had a strong focus on food supply issues historically. That is one of the reasons we have brought them into this new group to help us develop the plan. It is definitely an area that we need to strengthen for exactly the reasons you are suggesting. I don’t know if Helen wants to add to that.
Helen Dallas: I would add that in a lot of the resilience world and looking at CNI sectors, the local response would be quite reliant on the local resilience forums. For food, we think it goes much broader than that. Particularly during covid, we saw fantastic networks popping up in local areas, with communities looking after each other, many of which have remained in place. We want to work across those—across the national charities that look at food and across the food banks—to see how we can join up all these fantastic community organisations, who are the people who really understand where the vulnerable people are, and make sure that they have access to sufficient food, including during the most challenging of situations like a national power outage. That will all form part of this plan that we are going to write, helping communities and those sorts of organisations understand what is out there to help them get to that point.
Q98 Mr Betts: Who would be responsible at a local level? Is there a clearly identified responsible organisation?
Emily Miles: The local resilience forum would co-ordinate, and they are usually chaired by a chief constable. One of the things we want to do in our plan is set out responsibilities at national, local and industry level.
Mr Betts: So it would be clearly identified. I think the general assumption is that if no one is responsible, in the end everyone gets a bit of responsibility and it falls apart.
Paul Kissack: I agree. The experience in covid was that we did get food to people, but we were, to some degree, making it up as we went along. It comes back to codifying what we know works and going into any crisis with much greater clarity on who is responsible for what. That is what the plan would intend to do.
Q99 Chair: Paul and Emily, I don’t mind which of you answers this. There was a lot of good work done, as you have just indicated, permanent secretary, during covid, and a lot of good databases were built up—certainly in my authority, and I am sure in authorities up and down the country. I would be very keen, under local government reorganisation, for that information not to be lost so that we can build on it in a future emergency. I wonder if you could look at that.
Paul Kissack: Of course.
Chair: Thank you. Sarah Hall, you have been waiting very patiently.
Q100 Sarah Hall: Thank you. I want to continue along the theme of the LRFs. The NAO has identified significant weaknesses in local preparedness for food supply disruptions. Some of that relates to the uncertainty about the role and what is expected of them during a major food disruption. I suppose I want to know how DEFRA, MHCLG and other stakeholders are working together to strengthen that LRF preparedness and response capability. Is there now clear guidance, and are there defined expectations for LRFs? What practical measures are being taken?
Paul Kissack: I will turn to Helen, but I will just make a point on why I think there is a bit of a lack of clarity about the role of LRFs when it comes to food supply. LRFs tend to work off the national risk register, which provides around 95 different risks. Each one of those has a reasonable worst-case scenario, which we effectively ask local resilience forums to plan for. There isn’t a specific risk on food supply in the national risk register. There isn’t one of those 95 risks that is a reasonable worst-case scenario around food supply. Food supply is, though, identified in around half the risks as an impact of that thing happening. In a sense, the questions around food supply are all over the national risk register when you read it, but there is not a specific reasonable worst-case scenario on food supply.
Q101 Sarah Hall: Is that likely to be a change or addition? It is great that it is included in a range of things, but it is quite a pressing issue, particularly as we have seen what is happening in France and what you were talking about with cyber-security and so on.
Paul Kissack: It is a question that is raised in the NAO Report and one that we will want to look at. In the meantime, the food system is a critical national infrastructure—one of 13. It is also identified as one of our national response capabilities. It is all over the national security infrastructure, as it were. There is just a very particular thing that then feeds through to LRFs, which I think creates this lack of clarity.
Helen Dallas: We are aware of and would agree with the findings of the NAO Report that a lot more work needs doing in this area. Capacity is quite an issue for the LRFs, so we need to work within what they are able to do. We are using the resilience structures across Government to do that, working closely with MHCLG and across wider structures. We are setting up some forums, and others are already in place, where we can speak in detail with the LRFs. In fact, I have been talking to MHCLG in the last couple of weeks about setting up a very specific forum on this, which I hope we will be able to do soon.
Q102 Sarah Hall: Why is it taking so long to deliver? During covid, there was obviously quite a run on shops and a rush to get food supplies. That was in 2020, so why has it taken so long to get to this point, where we are only just talking about having something and have not actually started it yet?
Helen Dallas: In 2020, we and the NAO found that industry was able to plug that gap. Yes, we had a run on shops, particularly in the beginning, but industry was very quickly able to address that. What we recognise now is that there are broader, bigger issues on the threat landscape, which we need a whole-of-society approach to. That is why we are now focusing effort here.
Q103 Sarah Hall: Okey-dokey. Obviously, this is quite pressing, so when do you expect it to come to fruition?
Helen Dallas: This is all part of the plan that we have been talking about. We are aiming to publish it as soon as we can. We are actively working with all the players who need to be involved to develop the plan and get us to a point where we can publish something.
Q104 Sarah Hall: How soon do you think that could be?
Paul Kissack: I would like to aim for the end of next year. I say that with slight jeopardy because I do not know whether we can achieve that, and until we get into the detailed work with the range of stakeholders we have been talking about, I will not have confidence in exactly what the right timescale is. We might be able to do some aspects of it sooner, so I do not want to commit to a particular timescale, but that is the kind of timeline we are working on.
Sarah Hall: It is always good to have that aim.
Paul Kissack: Yes, and these are groups that we intend to meet every couple of months, and we will keep the work going.
Q105 Sarah Hall: How will you assess whether it has improved? Will it be a moveable feast, with you reviewing it time and again?
Paul Kissack: I think it will be a constant review process. Helen answered a question earlier about getting an external review to stress-test and red-team whether the plan works. To some degree, you get to test these plans in real time because events happen. You also get to test them through exercising, and we will have a programme of exercising.
Chair: I call Anna Dixon; welcome.
Q106 Anna Dixon: I apologise for being late, Chair. It has been an interesting hearing. In terms of identifying vulnerable people, Paul, can you explain what work is being done to share data nationally—say, around DWP or the NHS—so we can understand where there are people with disabilities who may be particularly vulnerable or housebound and respond more quickly to those who are likely to need support?
Paul Kissack: Again, I am going to go to Helen because she is the expert in this area, but overall, we have to bear in mind that, as you know, there is not a single definition of vulnerable people. The circumstances of individual people within different scenarios, whether it is a national power outage or a cyber-attack or whatever, mean different groups become vulnerable.
It is not always the groups that you would naturally assume are vulnerable. We talked earlier about people who are on low incomes and may struggle to have a small stock of food in their house. In certain scenarios, infants under the age of six months who are solely fed on baby infant formula, even if they are in quite wealthy households, could become vulnerable in certain circumstances. We have to map out what vulnerability looks like in each scenario.
Helen Dallas: Absolutely, and I would extend that a bit to look at how vulnerability changes. In something like a national power outage, if you have somebody living in a studio flat in London who buys their dinner on the way home every night, they are immediately very vulnerable, when they might not have been on anybody’s radar at all before that.
Recognising how vulnerability changes depending on the scenario is really important. It is the first thing that happens in my team. When something happens and we realise we need to respond, the first conversation is, “Who is vulnerable? Who is going to be at the most risk in this situation and how can we focus our response on them?” Often, that involves talking to the likes of DWP, DHSC, MHCLG and perhaps those Departments responsible for public sector settings to make sure we have got a really full understanding. But it can change in each scenario.
Some brilliant things were done during covid, which I think are replicable. For example, there were five charities—I am not going to be able to name all of them—including the Royal National Institute of Blind People, which was able to nominate people to say, “This is a vulnerable person; they need priority access to online delivery slots.” We have things like that that can be replicated, and as Paul has said a few times, that is where we need to codify things. That is an automatic thing that happens and we know exactly how to do that, rather than laying the track in front of us as was being done with covid.
Emily Miles: May I add one thing? There is also a priority services register, so if you are concerned, you can sign up and then utilities companies will have you on their list.
Q107 Anna Dixon: We had a hearing. I do appreciate and am glad that you are defining vulnerability by circumstance; it is a long-standing point that I make to most Departments about not just assuming that people are vulnerable.
I want to push slightly on the data linkage, because we know that during covid, local authorities and the NHS found ways to join up their data and identify people that had been struggling for decades to do it. All the barriers were swept away during covid. We do not want to wait for the next crisis to do that again, so I want to understand, particularly on data sharing and linkage to make us more resilient as a society, whether there was any progress on that. I think you are saying that, in the circumstances, you will talk to the right people, but I would have liked to hear a bit more about looking and planning ahead with that data sharing so that, in the eventuality that you need to identify certain groups, the data can be accessed.
Paul Kissack: I think you are raising a really important point, and it is something we should add into the programme of work we have as we develop the new framework.
Emily Miles: It is also something we should do as we review powers.
Anna Dixon: Yes, if you need or have new powers.
Q108 Rupert Lowe: I just had a message from my team, who have been listening to the SFI statement from the Under-Secretary in Parliament. He basically blamed the SFI debacle on the mess that the Government inherited from the previous Government. He is refusing to apologise to farmers, and apparently, from listening to the debate, the Government are accepting no accountability for what I would describe as a complete farce. I genuinely think that the public and MPs like me—I represent farmers in Great Yarmouth—have had enough of this buck-passing and blaming of everybody else.
I do not know what experience you have in farming, Paul, but listening to your answers today, you seemed very confident that DEFRA was fit for purpose, which I would totally disagree with. When are we going to get some honesty about the crisis that is now facing the farming and retailing industries—the agricultural merchants, the machinery dealers? It is a crisis that is about to come and haunt you, and I think you would do well to have a good look into it. Are you a farmer? Have you had experience of food production? It did not look like it from your CV.
Paul Kissack: I live in a farming community.
Rupert Lowe: Right, but do you farm?
Paul Kissack: No, I do not farm.
Rupert Lowe: Do you have experience of farming?
Paul Kissack: Not directly—I picked potatoes in fields when I was growing up in a rural community.
Q109 Rupert Lowe: When do you think we are going to get some honesty? I do not even know how many members of staff at DEFRA have any farming experience. When are you going to start listening to the farmers in industry rather than believing your own narrative?
Paul Kissack: We do not have our own narrative, we have a narrative that is informed by exactly what you are describing: endless engagement with lots of stakeholders, including many farmers. I go out and visit lots of farms and people across the food industry more generally. I was sat at the table with a potato farmer the other day who was telling me in no uncertain terms what he thought about SFI and the challenges he was facing; he was desperate to try to build a reservoir on his farmland. That is what we need to hear in the Department. We have lots of people—not just me—out across the country having those conversations. Our understanding of farming is informed by conversations with farmers.
I have given you a very honest account today of the degree to which we understand the challenges that are going on in farming right now. They are challenges that are not necessarily of our making—they are challenges of the weather, which sadly we do not control, of high input costs as a result of global events, and of lower output costs as a result of global markets. We absolutely recognise that context. We face into it, we have conversations with farmers and we work out how we can support them, but we try to support them toward the long-term resilience of farming through environmental land management and greater productivity and innovation.
Q110 Rupert Lowe: Can you tell the Committee when you are going to have a scheme for those farmers who missed out on SFI because of what I would describe as extremely bad management and not having a planned window to allow people to plan long term? When are you going to come forward with something that tells the 60%-plus of farmers who did not get into SFI when they are going to have a plan for their land? To Geoffrey’s point, when do they decide to plough up all the stuff that they have done in the past?
Paul Kissack: Just to be clear, more than half of farmers are in ELM contracts. More than half of farmers—
Rupert Lowe: Sixty per cent got in; 40% did not.
Paul Kissack: But they are the cohort of farmers who were eligible to apply for that single window. There are multiple windows, and there are farmers who have multiple-year contracts already.
Q111 Rupert Lowe: When is the next window?
Paul Kissack: The next one is SFI27. That will be launched as soon as possible.
Rupert Lowe: It is not until next year, is it?
Paul Kissack: It is SFI27, so it will not be until next year.
Q112 Rupert Lowe: So what are farmers supposed to do between now and then?
Paul Kissack: Twenty thousand farmers are now in three-year contracts as a result of SFI26. That is one in five farmers. That is almost £1 billion over the next three years. That is from windows 1 and 2 of SFI26. SFI27 will be the next opportunity for farmers to apply for SFI funding; we are learning the lessons that you are encouraging us to learn from SFI window 2, and we will launch it as soon as we can.
Q113 Rupert Lowe: Do you think that is an ideal situation for those people trying to plan a long-term business?
Paul Kissack: No, I do not think it is ideal, but I work in Government; we do not deal in ideals. We have to be very practical about what we can do with the resources we have available. That is what I am trying to explain. I have a finite budget. Ministers have a finite budget. They have to make difficult decisions.
As you know, if you have greater levels of demand than the supply of funding, you have to make quite difficult decisions about what is fair and just, and how you get that money to as many farmers as possible. The Minister has made a number of decisions to make sure that the money went to as many farmers as possible, capping the amount of money that went to some of the larger farmers. We now have more farmers than ever before in ELM schemes, and we will continue to work on that as we go into SFI27.
Q114 Rupert Lowe: You are telling me what I already know. Ultimately, when are we going to get some honesty from people running the industry? You are running the industry. There is far too much Government throughout the entire economy. The state accounts for far too much of GDP. When are you going to own up to the fact that you are responsible? When is the buck-passing going to stop? How much longer do the Government have to be in power before they accept responsibility for things that go wrong?
Paul Kissack: I am not passing any bucks. I am giving you an entirely honest account of how we have run the SFI scheme, the challenges that we are facing and the things we have to lean into as we go into SFI27.
Rupert Lowe: I am going to run a poll on my social media to see whether the farmers agree with me or you. I will let you know the outcome.
Paul Kissack: I can probably guess.
Chair: Does anybody have any more questions?
Rachel Gilmour: Can I ask one thing?
Chair: Of course. We have time.
Q115 Rachel Gilmour: I accept what you said about the budget being upped by £40 million relatively last minute.
Paul Kissack: It was upped by 40%—by about £70 million.
Rachel Gilmour: So will the lesson be learned for next year that the system needs to be changed so that we do not have the scramble we had this year? The application system needs to be changed, but at the end of the day, the scheme needs to have more money in it to meet the demand. Isn’t that just the basic fact?
Paul Kissack: The more money there is, the easier it would be to run an SFI scheme to meet as much demand as possible. I do not have control over that. I have a set budget.
We also have to meet the environmental goals that are set out in statute by Parliament; I have an obligation to meet those as well. As we are trying to work out how to spend our finite money, we want to do it in a way that supports food production, supports farmers to move to more resilient agricultural approaches and delivers our environmental targets, which we are required to do that by Parliament. That is how I have to try and support Ministers in using our finite budget.
We will continue to do that as best as we can—to stretch the money to as many farmers as we possibly can to support that transition. Obviously, I would like SFI27 to be much more orderly than the second window of SFI26. We will absolutely be learning the lessons with Ministers on what we can do.
I cannot guarantee that there will not be challenges. That is because the mismatch between the number of farmers who are coming forward wanting to take environmental land management actions, and the budget available to pay for them, continues.
Q116 Rupert Lowe: Thank you for that, Rachel. At the beginning, I said you had underspent your critical agricultural budget by £350 million. Do you disagree with that?
Paul Kissack: I did not recognise that number. I am not disagreeing. It is just not a number I am familiar with.
Q117 Rupert Lowe: Can the Committee know whether you have underspent your budget over consecutive years? I think you have. In fact, I know you have, so perhaps you can confirm.
Paul Kissack: Over the last two years we have spent just under £5 billion through the farming budget.
Rupert Lowe: That is not the issue. You have opened and closed an SFI window, and you have added £40 million, but you still underspent your budget, so it is not a matter of being short of money, is it?
Paul Kissack: I am happy to write to the Committee on that.
Chair: Yes, if you would clarify that, it would be really helpful. Thank you, permanent secretary.
Q118 Anna Dixon: Given that we have moved on to the subject of SFI and I was not able to be in for the statement, I thought I might take the opportunity to talk about the experience of my smaller farmers. One of the challenges is that some of the very large landholders seem to have been better able to access some of the funding opportunities. Am I right that efforts were made to create a separate window of opportunity for the smallest farms to apply for some funding? Would you look at revising that as we move into the ’27 round, to recognise that there are some that fall above that very smallest farm but who we need to distinguish from the largest farms to make sure the scheme recognises the size, scale and variety of farms we have across the country?
Chair: I think we have covered that point, but do you want to recapitulate it?
Paul Kissack: Very briefly. You are right: there were a few things we did to make sure that small farmers had better access to SFI this time around than previously. One of those was that we inserted a cap of £100,000 as the maximum amount any individual farm could have. Previously about 25% of the SFI budget went to just 4% of farmers, so we inserted a cap in order to be able to spread the money more broadly.
We had an initial window that ran in a very successful and orderly fashion, getting money—I think about £70 million—out to either smaller farmers or to those who had not been in an ELM scheme previously. You are right: there is always a question about the definition of small farms. We can no doubt look again at that definition. Sorry, please do not take that as a hint that we might change it; I have absolutely no idea, but there is always a reasonable question about how we define small farming.
Anna Dixon: On behalf of my farmers, I appreciate you taking that feedback.
Rachel Gilmour: Mine too. We can help you define what a small farm is because I have loads of them.
Chair: I thank you all very much. I reiterate that there is a lot of worry out there in the farming community. People have been farming for generations, wondering if the next generation is going to be able to carry on. If farmers cannot make a profit, they will not be there to grow food, and the country will ultimately face a disadvantage to that effect. I think that your Ministry needs to recognise the despair out there in the farming industry and do all it can to reassure farmers that there is a future. I am not actually sure that I have heard this morning that there is a future for some of the farmers in my patch who live on pretty poor soils and who are deeply concerned about their future. I leave you with that message; it is a serious message. If you want to hear how my farmers are getting on, you are very welcome to come to one of my quarterly meetings to hear directly from them. I can even take you round some of those farms. I extend that invitation to you.
Rachel Gilmour: You are going to be visiting a lot of farms.
Paul Kissack: I visit a lot of farms already, but I am very happy to visit more in your constituencies.
Chair: I thank all three of you very much. An uncorrected version of the transcript will be available in the coming days. We will produce a report, no doubt on the whole of the food and farming resilience week that we have had, with recommendations. I hope that you will study those carefully. We look forward to seeing you again in the future to see how you have progressed with some of the things you have said today.