Tory MP: Food poverty is growing, food banks are not the answer
Laura Sandys says the government needs to tackle supermarket dominance and get a grip on food policy if it is to address the UK's food crisis
Emal
Food banks are not the answer to food poverty, the supermarket-dominated UK food system is not fit for purpose, and ministers need to take on more of an interventionist role if the UK is to ensure that its citizens get the food they need.
No, that's not Oxfam or George Monbiot, but an independent-minded backbench Tory MP, Laura Sandys.
Sandys set out her thoughts at a meeting in the House of Commons last night organised by the social justice charity Just Fair (see audio file above). She called for ministers to take a stronger regulatory approach to tackle rampant food inflation, to prevent consumers being ripped off, and to rebuild the UK's consumer's declining food skills.
That meant controlling food policy she said, rather than delegating it to the supermarkets. The big food retailers had promised "so-called very very cheap food", supposedly distributed efficiently to consumers. But this promise, she said, was unravelling under the pressure of soaring food prices:
In many ways over the last seven years we've had the biggest crisis to affect the food system and that is something that nobody really wants to believe, and have put their head in the sand on, and that is massive food inflation. Over the last five years, [we've seen] 29% inflation on food whereas everything else has remained more or less static.
What "cheap food" was actually delivering was excessive amounts of often nutritionally poor produce - the "buy one get 10 free" phenomenon.
In many ways the system is there to throw as much so-called cheap food onto you, and in many ways what it is doing is not delivering both the quality of food and the food that you need in the way that you need it.
So what had been going on the in the world of "cheap food" where everything is getting more expensive? Sandys effectively accused food producers of ripping off consumers. The £1 cottage pie five years on was still £1, despite 29% inflation. It looked identical, it still had the same packaging, but it wasn't the same product, she said. Although "shrinkage" was going on, producers weren't letting on to consumers:
It doesn't say 30% less meat on the side of it [the packaging]
The government, she said, had to reclaim responsibility for food policy in three areas:
Number one, absolute transparency and clarity to the consumer... Number two, we need to really re-invest in [food] skills... something which has been lapsed for many, many years... The third thing we need to do is to ensure that nutrition and nutritional food, particularly for families and young people, is [prioritized] much higher [in the] social services, the education system and the health system.
The meeting was about food poverty, in part to discuss the Walking the Breadline report published last week by Oxfam, and Church Action on Poverty. It estimated that food banks were now feeding over 500,000 a year in the UK. Sandys was clear that foodbanks would not address the growing problem of food poverty:
I totally appreciate what food banks are doing but... they are not the answer, they are merely sticky tape over a serious problem which will grow.
It's clear that in some ways Sandys is not representative of mainstream conservative attitudes to food poverty, which tend to be either sceptical that it exists in the UK, or in denial about the links between welfare reform and hunger. Coalition policy has tended to resist state-led solutions to public policy issues, preferring voluntary or "nudge" approaches, although there are signs of cross-party consensus on the threats to UKfood security.
Sandys warned that the Coalition government had two years to address the challenges of food poverty and food policy.
Hopefully, we will be able to secure a much more resillient and a much fairer food system into the future.
• Thanks to Jonny Butterworth of Just Fair for the audio file
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