Strengthening the UK’s Food Security: FDF Reaction to Policy Exchange Report

Enhancing UK food security requires action across the entire food system to promote innovation, ease supply chain pressures, and strengthen industry resilience. With industry still recovering from global shocks in recent years, further pressure from geopolitical and climate-related events are inevitable, and the sector should not be overlooked in terms of its potential contribution to national and household food security.

The FDF is in full support of the following 5 key recommendations for government action from the report:

1. Government should develop a National Food Security Strategy that encompasses the entire food ecosystem. A National Food Security Strategy should address the entire food ecosystem, including manufacturing, logistics, wholesale, retail, and hospitality. It should be overseen by a Cabinet Committee or ministerial working group, collaborating with government departments, bodies, and devolved governments to develop the strategy, resolve interdepartmental policy differences, ensuring the creation of a food system fit for the future.
2. Government should construct a clear long-term policy view that will reduce regulatory uncertainty across the food ecosystem and provide the confidence for investment in a lower risk environment. The sector is held back by uncertainty and short-termism and requires stability to invest. This should be led by the Cross Departmental Working Group and feed into the National Food Security Strategy, to create an environment that increases resilience to shocks and ensures food will be healthy, safe, affordable and sustainable.
3. Future Industrial Strategies and Advanced Manufacturing Strategies should explicitly include Food and Drink Manufacturing as a priority sector. Food manufacturing is the largest manufacturing sector in the economy with nearly 20% of all manufacturing turnover in the UK coming from food and drink. The sector also employs 472,000 people, providing good jobs in every region of the country. It is critical that any future Industrial Strategy should have food and drink manufacturing at its heart to ensure the long-term sustainability of economic growth across the UK.
4. The UKRI Transforming Food Production challenge should be relaunched and broadened to become Transforming Food Security. Relaunching UKRI Transforming Food Production challenge to Transforming Food Security would fund research across the food whole food ecosystem, with a particularly enhanced focus on food manufacturing on a similar level to agriculture, as well as investments in storage, logistics and retail.
5. The Government should take a holistic approach to trade policy and food security. Although export promotion should remain key to UK trade policy, a greater consideration of the role of imports and intermediate suppliers will help increase the resilience of the UK food system and supply chain.

These recommendations show why it is critical that this new government builds a National Food Security Strategy that supports the entire supply chain, building a robust food system for the future.

Karen Betts, CEO of The Food and Drink Federation, said: 

“We welcome this insightful report from the Policy Exchange, which rightly puts food and drink at the heart of Whitehall policymaking.

The UK has a highly sophisticated food system, which supports everyone’s daily lives by providing a wide range of affordable, safe and nutritious food and drink.  But we must not take it for granted.  Challenges lie ahead which need investment if our food system is to remain secure – from the innovation needed to tackle climate change, raise productivity and invest in new products, to keeping prices fair for suppliers and consumers, and ensuring the UK strikes the right balance between domestic production and trade.  Taking the right policy decisions now, weighed across Whitehall departments and as recommended by Policy Exchange, will lay the foundations for UK food security into the future.”