Environment Bill — House of Lords, 2021-07-05
Topic: Agriculture
Rosel Boycott (Crossbench, Unknown): My Lords, I really wish that I was not having to move this amendment. I speak as the chair of Feeding Britain, and all through this pandemic we have been giving out meals to an extraordinary amount of people—the numbers have doubled. We have got food from many different food redistribution companies, notably companies such as FareShare and individual supermarkets. Many supermarkets have stepped up to the challenge over the last 18 months and have given away a great deal more food, but there are still lapses in the system. This is, essentially, an extremely simple amendment that just says that big supermarkets must, by law, have a relationship with a food redistribution centre. This was introduced a few years back by Kerry McCarthy in the other place. Indeed, the now Minister, the noble Lord, Lord Goldsmith, signed her 10-minute rule Bill supporting this idea, and such a proposal is now law in France We have just been listening to lots of statistics about waste. The most recent one that I have found is that the UK’s biggest supermarkets bin 190 million meals a year. Is that true? I do not know, but it comes from WRAP. My guess is that it is true, and that a lot of food that is up to its sell-by date but still perfectly edible is chucked out the door. That is really what I want to see changed—and I want it to change culturally. At the moment, food is very cheap; I want people to see that it has a value and importance. In the end, with this amendment, as the chair of Feeding Britain, I would like us all to be put of business; at the moment, we are not out of business and are, in fact, incredibly needed. As people come off furlough, the numbers who are using Feeding Britain feeding sites are rising, not going down One of the other things that I talk about in this amendment is that we need to get to the food waste pyramid. Food should always be thought of as food for humans: if it has not been sold, it must go for donation; if we cannot eat it, it should feed an animal; and if that cannot happen, it should feed the soil. There is a very exact pyramid to show the way that this works The amendment also seeks penalties for retailers which do not do this and to ensure that the volume of food being wasted is at least—and this is where I challenge the Government, because I know that this is above their targets—60% lower than the 2020 baseline for 2025 and 80% lower than the 2020 baseline for 2030 I did not make this up. I consulted Dave Lewis who, from 2014 until last year, ran Tesco. I asked him what it would take, what we can do, who we can push, and what we can achieve. He came back with these figures. I know the figures will be repeated in the food strategy, so this is doable and challenging. As we all know, this is the year of COP. Food waste is responsible for so much: relevant to the last group of amendments, food waste is the reason we have so much plastic floating around. All these things connect. It is about getting the public to understand that food is valuable and plastic is valuable, and therefore must not be thrown away. We need to do it in the right way My other point in this amendment is that the Secretary of State must conduct a public education campaign around the question of food waste and making people understand that, every time we throw food away, we are adding to our environmental problems. As many noble Lords have just said, throwing food away with the plastic adds to all sorts of environment and social problems, but food itself costs air, soil and energy. As the Dasgupta reported showed, these things are valuable and valuable to our society I hope that at least part of this quite long amendment will be taken up by the Government. There are currently 13 million people in this country, mostly kids, who are what you could call food-stressed—they do not have enough food and cannot afford enough healthy food. If you want to eat 1,000 healthy calories, it costs about five times more than it does to eat 1,000 unhealthy calories. Much of the food that hits its sell-by date is good, proper food. It has been grown, processed and packaged; a lot has gone into it and we chuck it. We could, very easily—and culturally it would be a big deal—just put this amendment in the Bill and be like the French. Their food recycling went up immediately by 20%—that is a lot of meals.