Remember the National Food Strategy? Heralded as the first major review of the UK food system in nearly 75 years, it was announced back in 2019 by the then environment secretary Michael Gove as a “once-in-a-generation opportunity to cultivate a stronger food system for the future.” Publication of its final report should have been a historic moment. It should also have been the perfect statement of intent for Britain ahead of the UN Food Systems Summit in September, the pre-summit for which starts this week in Rome.
Yet less than two weeks after the strategy and its 14 recommendations were unveiled, it seems all too obvious that the current government intends to let it gather dust. The reason for this is simple: the strategy is a challenge to this government’s free trade aspirations for the economy and its libertarian approach to society—one which it is incapable of meeting.
It is a sign of how steeply and sharply this government has fallen that barely two years ago the strategy was set up with ambition and optimism. Gove had made many enemies as education secretary but he took food and agriculture seriously and won the respect of many who were not natural allies, such as National Farmers’ Union President Minette Batters.
When Gove signed off the terms of reference for the National Food Strategy, he said with solemnity that “We have a moral, as well as practical, responsibility to consider the role and impacts of the food system.” The strategy’s aim was to enable a system that “delivers safe, healthy, affordable food, regardless of where people live or how much they earn,” “restores and enhances the natural environment for the next generation in this country” and “is built upon a resilient, sustainable and humane agriculture sector.”
Henry Dimbleby, co-founder of the healthy fast-food chain Leon, was appointed to lead the strategy, but he had barely started when Boris Johnson became prime minister, Gove was replaced with Theresa Villiers, and the priorities shifted from raising standards at home to lowering them as much as was needed to secure the trade deals Brexit had made urgent.
The first clear evidence that the government had lost interest in the ambition of the strategy came after Dimbleby published part one of the report in June 2020. Originally this was intended as “a broad analysis of the strengths and flaws of the entire food system from farm to fork,” without any concrete proposals. But Covid and the end of the Brexit tradition period injected some urgency, and the interim report included seven recommendations.
Yet it quickly became clear that the government was not willing to engage seriously. And one year later, with depressing predictability, it has implemented the easy, cheap, piecemeal recommendations and ignored the truly challenging ones around making preferential tariffs on food imports dependent on meeting UK standards, giving parliament the time and opportunity to properly scrutinise any new trade deal and expanding eligibility for Free School Meals.
The government’s initial response to the final strategy suggests it has lost even the passing interest it showed in part one. It has said almost nothing. Current Environment Secretary George Eustice’s only response has been to “thank Henry Dimbleby and his team for their work on the independent review of the food system” on behalf of the government and reiterate its commitment to produce a white paper within six months. The prime minister promised to “study [the] report with interest,” but his remark that “I think it’s an independent report” (it is) hardly suggests he’s been paying much attention, while his glib “there are doubtless some good ideas in it” sounds like a polite brush-off.
The only specific response any member of the government has given has been to dismiss the proposed salt and sugar tax, with Johnson saying: “I am not, I must say, attracted to the idea of extra taxes on hard-working people, let me just signal that.”
The focus on the unpopular tax, which was also the most reported recommendation, was a canny move from the government. It deflects attention from the fact that the most striking feature of the strategy is its explicit recognition that the food system is complicated and requires systemic thinking to get right. Making the salt and sugar tax the defining feature of the strategy grossly distorts its much more holistic approach. That suits a government that likes to leave as much as possible to business and consumers rather than elected politicians and citizens. Given its reluctance to intervene even when the bodies were piling up in a pandemic, there is little chance that it would seriously try to reform anything as complex as the food system unless people were literally starving.
To take the strategy seriously would require some serious state intervention. The government sees its unwillingness to do this as a sign that it is business- and market-friendly, but all it really shows is that it doesn’t understand how effective markets work. Many CEOs of big food businesses told Dimbleby’s team that they wanted to do the right thing in terms of health, the environment and animal welfare. But they also made it clear that “some changes will require government legislation to ensure a level playing field.” Dimbleby concludes, correctly, that “If food companies are to start making their products healthier, they must be confident that the competition won’t simply move in and undercut them.”
“Making the salt and sugar tax the defining feature of the strategy grossly distorts its holistic approach”
Any intelligent free-market economist can understand this. Markets fail when economic actors are allowed to create “negative externalities”: costs generated by their businesses that others pick up. In the food system the three key externalities are the costs to the health service of treating patients with diet-related ill-health, the environmental damage caused by destructive farming methods, and the misery of animals reared in factory farms. Failure to legislate against such externalities saves individual food companies money but it costs the nation as a whole. And the failure to ensure imports meet standards that protect against such externalities means that they are simply offshored to countries with laxer regulations.
Dimbleby, NGOs, industry and academics can all see this. The government can’t because it takes a simplistic view of both economic and social freedom. In terms of the former, it is wedded to a naive faith in the power of free markets when trade without regulation simply creates monopolies, free-riding rentiers and pillagers of society’s shared resources.
As for the latter, take, for instance, its rush to get to “freedom day,” when most Covid restrictions were lifted. The kind of freedom people want is to live safely, which is why the public has consistently favoured keeping many restrictions in place. Similarly, the freedom for all to eat well cannot exist without a food system that makes it possible.
Freedom for Johnson’s Conservatives means the freedom to put others at risk, to offshore your externalities, to pollute, to underpay staff, to sell people junk disguised as nutritious food, to create misery for farm animals. As long as the fetters are off, anything goes. Like a road system without a highway code, it is a market that is free but dysfunctional.
The National Food Strategy is not flawless, but it shows with rare clarity the impotence of an ideology that sees freedom purely as the absence of restraints. If we want farmers to be free to look after their animals well, to care for the soil and biodiversity; for food producers to be free to make healthy and affordable products; for schools and hospitals to be free to serve tasty and nutritious meals, they have to be given the means to attain such freedoms. That requires, rules, investments, subsidies and levies.
The National Food Strategy made this case with eloquence, evidence and ethics. That’s why it has been broadly welcomed by the Food Standards Agency, the Institute of Food Science and Technology, the Royal Agricultural University, and a wide range of NGOs, including those part of the Eating Better Alliance. Even those generally wary of some of the measures proposed found much to support in it, including the National Farmers’ Union and many in the food industry.
The government, however, has done its level best to ensure that the report will soon be dead in the water. Hope is not lost: its ghost will come back to haunt future governments which perpetuate the problems with our food system. Dimbleby produced the report for the present government, but our best hope lies with its successors.
