I congratulate the hon. Member for Totnes (Anthony Mangnall) on securing the debate. I thought I had missed it last week, so I was pleasantly surprised to see it on the Order Paper again.
The hon. Member mentioned the Government consultation on public sector food and catering that closed on 4 September 2022. Almost ever since then, it has become something of an obsession of mine to chase the Government for a response. The last time I asked, in September, I was told it would be out this year—which means by next Tuesday—so I hope the Minister has good news for us today. I gather that the 126 responses were the reason given for it taking so long. That is not that many, so I hope the Minister can tell us how many people are working on looking at those responses. It should not have taken 15 months to come to a conclusion.
One thing that was consulted on was the idea that 50% of food procured should be locally sourced and/or sustainable. When I chaired the all-party parliamentary group on agroecology for sustainable food and farming, we were very keen to look at what France was doing. It showed that it can be done, and in a country full of farmers, they very much welcomed it. I support that. The leader of my party, the right hon. and learned Member for Holborn and St Pancras (Keir Starmer), committed us to it when he spoke at the NFU a while ago, so I am keen to hear from the Minister whether that is still in active consideration.
As I said, I used to chair the APPG on agroecology. In that role, I had the pleasure—it was quite a pleasure—of interviewing the then DEFRA Secretary, the right hon. Member for Surrey Heath (Michael Gove), on stage at the Oxford Real Farming conference. He went down very well with the audience—this was before the Agriculture Act 2020 came in—because it was the first time, I think, that a serving Conservative Secretary of State had been to the conference. This was more the agroecological end of things than traditional farming. One thing on which he got a good response was committing to more support for county farms, peri-urban farming and local farming in general.
As a Bristol MP, I think there is so much potential. We have gold status as a sustainable food city, but we also have food deserts where people cannot access affordable and healthy food, so the idea that through public sector procurement we could become the customers of things that are being grown in Somerset, in Gloucestershire and nearby—we are surrounded by countryside—to an extent to which we are not at the moment seems so much something that should be at the heart of what we are trying to do. That was followed up when I was on the Bill Committee for the Agriculture Act 2020, when the then Minister confirmed that it was very much something the Government were going to do. Unfortunately, I then had a meeting over Zoom—this was during covid—with his successor, and it just seemed like it had dropped off the table all together.
Will the Minister tell us whether he sees county farms and peri-urban farming playing an important role, and what has happened to the land use framework? There is
quite a long list of DEFRA things that seem to have disappeared into the ether, but maybe the Minister has just got a very big in-tray and it is somewhere in there. I hope that part of that land use framework will include earmarking what land could be used for development to support this kind of peri-urban farming approach.
I also want to ask the Minister about the horticultural strategy. We do know that it, at least, has been definitely dropped. The strategy would have promoted the growing and consumption of more fresh fruit and vegetables, which the sector was very much pushing for. It was only after I attended a Food Foundation event and was asked if I knew what had happened to it that I tabled a question and found out that the strategy had actually been dropped. The sector had not even been told. In fact, it had been announced via a written question in the Lords, but the sector had then gone on to have meetings with DEFRA officials—there was at least one roundtable —about the proposal after it had been dropped. We know the pressures that fruit and vegetable growers are under; we know the importance of the strategy. Can the Minister explain why that was dropped? I have read the written answers, but they did not do justice to the question.
Finally, I want to briefly talk about school food standards and food poverty. One in four teachers reported that they have been bringing in food themselves for hungry pupils over the last term, while seven in 10 schools have said they are supplying basic food and hygiene items to children. There is the basic issue of not having access to enough food, but we know there is even more of a problem when we get on to healthy food. I congratulate Henry Dimbleby on his excellent work on this issue. I went to his book launch—I think Chefs in Schools, which does excellent work, provided the catering. We know that school food is not up to the nutritional and sustainability standards that we would like to see. In addition, according to The BMJ, in 2020, just 1.6% of packed lunches met school food standards, so there is also an issue with that.
The Government did say at one point that they were going to review the national school food standards. They told me that in response to questions, but later confirmed in response to other questions that they did not feel the need to do so. I absolutely feel, as we have heard, that the Government need to review those standards. We have a lot more information now on the nutritional impact of certain diets, and something that has been mentioned is the impact on behaviour. There was a very interesting study—going back quite a long time now—in young offenders institutions, which showed that once those teenage boys were taken off junk food, their behaviour changed radically. It seems to me, again, to be a bit of a no-brainer: why would we not seek to change their diets if we know we could basically save them from a lifetime spent in the criminal justice system by just doing something as important as feeding them properly?