Earlier this week, Steve Reed, the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural affairs, addressed the National Farmers Union to announce a raft of new policies to increase British farmer’s profitability – but do they actually deliver any new benefits?
The Government has committed to investing £310 million into agri-technology and improving resilience against animal disease; increasing higher level stewardship payments; and extending the Seasonal Worker visa route for five years. These proposals have been cautiously welcomed by farming bodies, including the National Farmers Union and the Country Land and Business Association.
But the largest policy announcement in the speech – a “new” target for at least half of food supplied to public catering contracts to be supplied by British farmers – isn’t a new announcement at all. That same policy was included in Labour’s 2024 election manifesto, after being championed in the House of Lords by the RERG’s own chair Baroness McIntosh of Pickering in 2022. Government catering contracts are worth £5 billion a year, and will provide a much-needed extra revenue stream to British agriculture, but the centrepiece of this announcement being a pre-existing policy is not a good look.
Whether the benefits of this target will reach ordinary farmers is also in question. According to the 2021 National Food Strategy Independent review, food procurement contracts are dominated by a few large suppliers whose market power means they can demand unsustainably low produce prices from farmers. Buying British food will only deliver benefits for farmers if paired with policies that allow small farmers to get a fair price for their products.
To accomplish this, the Government should aim to introduce dynamic food procurement platforms across the public sector. These platforms provide digital mini-markets for each food product, allowing small farmers to compete with large general suppliers to provide the products they specialise in. According to the Dynamic Food Procurement Advisory Board, since being trialled in 2018 these platforms have enabled small farmers to directly supply their products to local public sector markets, increased the share of locally grown food supplied to the public sector, and allowed local authorities to be more flexible in their procurement needs. The Government has begun to implement these platforms nationally, and we hope they continue to do so.
Steve Reed has said that he will “consider his time as Secretary of State a failure if I do not improve profitability for farmers”. Splashy targets are all very well, but the department must commit to nitty-gritty reforms truly targeted to benefit the average farmer if he wants to succeed in office.