Food Strategy board: who’s on it and what will they do?

Considering it took the last government nearly a decade to agree to any national food strategy recommendations, the fact Labour’s version is now underway after less than a year in power is quite an achievement.

That three months have passed since environment secretary Steve Reed called for a coalition of industry, government and campaign groups to tackle the food sector’s biggest challenges is not so good.

Neither is the fact that there is already a row behind the scenes over the make-up of the advisory board that will spearhead the strategy, as well as doubts over how will it fulfil its promise to deliver growth rather than just adding to the recent avalanche of taxation and regulation.

So, what should be expected from the strategy and its board?

On 21 March, Defra revealed 13 prominent figures who will meet once a month on its new Food Strategy Advisory Board, chaired by minister for food security and rural affairs Daniel Zeichner.

The strategy, confirmed Defra, will cover “skyrocketing” obesity levels, UK food resilience and supply chain strengthening, while protecting nature and biodiversity.

On top of that, the Food Strategy, which has dropped the prefix “national”, perhaps to downplay association with Henry Dimbleby’s 2021 report of the same name, will be tasked with putting growth at its heart, in line with the Treasury’s mission.

Yet no sooner had the board been named than senior food industry figures were sounding “alarm bells” over a regulatory clampdown. One said the make-up was “heavily geared towards the issue of obesity”, sending “worrying signals about the direction of travel”.

One name on Defra’s list that leaps out is England’s chief medical officer Professor Chris Whitty. A household name thanks to his role in the pandemic, he is a much more divisive figure for the industry, having published a report published in December, just two days after Reed kickstarted the food strategy, backing Dimbleby’s calls for new salt and sugar taxes, and mandatory reporting on HFSS sales.

Hailing the soft drinks levy as a “landmark public health intervention” which demonstrates “industry can be incentivised to provide healthier products through fiscal measures”, Whitty’s report suggests Dimbleby’s proposals could be “fine-tuned” to target the categories most responsible for the obesity crisis, and puts forward a windfall tax on businesses with high HFSS sales.

Alongside the advisory board, a separate cross-government group of ministers, led by Reed, will ultimately set the goals of the strategy, with health secretary Wes Streeting also on the group.

While recently Streeting seems to have cooled on the ‘nanny state’ agenda, which saw him come into government promising to “steamroller” companies, senior government sources predict the new Labour guard will lead to greater emphasis on regulation.

“The big decisions will come from Steve Reed’s group,” says a source. “We’ve heard they are plugged into DHSC and DBT.

“That close relationship with DHSC makes us worry about what its emphasis will be.”

Indeed, several members of the advisory board are firmly aligned to policies of fiscal intervention, including leading obesity professor Susan Jebb. Jebb was a driving force behind the soft drinks sugar levy and has been calling for further measures since. As chair of the FSA, Jebb last year welcomed calls by the House of Lords obesity committee for the body to take on a new role policing its proposals for taxes and mandatory reporting requirements on the food industry.

The government says its new board will use existing reports, including Dimbleby’s strategy, as the basis for policy discussion. It also plans to draw on several other studies, including the Food Foundation’s Broken Plate report – exec director Anna Taylor is also on the board.

Closely aligned with Dimbleby, the report in January found the price of healthy food was rising at twice the rate of less healthy options, and called on the government to strengthen the UK’s nutrient profiling model to shift thousands more products into the “unhealthy” category, claiming many UPFs were slipping the net of the looming junk food ad ban.

Among the report’s strongest backers was Chris Van Tulleken, who has fronted the crusade against UPF. The report was also welcomed by Zeichner who, speaking to the Foundation in February, vowed Labour was determined to take firm action to tackle obesity, unlike its predecessors.

But any move to expand the action on HFSS products to a wider UPF agenda will be hugely controversial, while a reviewed NPM has been gathering dust in the government vaults for years.

Another group with close government links and controversial plans is the “nudge” innovation body Nesta, whose CEO Ravi Gurumurthy has also been revealed as a board member.

In November, Nesta claimed the government could halve obesity by the end of the decade by expanding access to weight-loss drugs like Ozempic, and giving supermarkets mandatory targets on HFSS sales.

Nesta has also called for retailers to face fines of up to 1% of annual turnover if they fail to comply with a new system of mandatory health food sales targets

It’s little wonder supermarkets are worried then about he make up of the new board, especially as they are massively outgunned on it.

Only Sainsbury’s CEO Simon Roberts makes the frame.

Food manufacturers include Greencore CEO Dalton Philips, Flor Healy of Kerry Foods, McCain Foods president Jillian Moffatt and Sofina Foods CEO Ash Amirahmadi. Pig industry stalwart Sam Godfrey is the sole voice of farming.

“Only one retailer and one farmer compared to a dozen food processors and manufacturers,” notes one source. “I would describe that as imbalanced. And there are no representatives at all from hospitality, which is also really odd.”

Another source calls it a “weird mix which doesn’t represent the whole food chain”.

Big hitters

However, The Grocer understands the government is convinced it has enough big hitters on the board to make it credible.

The recruitment of Andrew Selley, CEO of foodservice giant Bidcorp UK, is regarded as a “coup”, as is bringing in IGD CEO Sarah Bradbury as co-secretariat.

The hope is the make-up will enable a pace which has often been missing from Defra and other government department plans, especially given the prospect of government cutbacks to departments. The board is seen as a “senior and pragmatic group of people able to get things done and make decisions”, in contrast to the “free thinkers” relied upon by Dimbleby.

The board is not about blue-sky thinking, it’s about helping the government to make policy choices, sources say.

Other “off the shelf proposals” include the work of the Food Data Transparency Partnership (FDTP), set up under the previous government in response to calls in Dimbleby’s report for greater transparency.

It has already secured the backing of a raft of leading retailers and manufacturers for a system of reporting on the “healthiness” of their sales, although there have been doubts about its role under Labour, especially as the FDTP dropped plans for the reporting to be mandatory.

But the FDTP’s work on health reporting and a separate workstream on eco-labelling, given the environmental targets of the strategy, could yet find itself given a new injection of life.

Read more:

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• Food Strategy exclusive: we must turn Dimbleby’s junk food cycle into growth, says minister

• National Food Strategy panel of expert members revealed

• Junk food ad ban facing ‘multiple’ legal challenges as ministers refuse law rewrite

It is less clear how the food strategy will achieve the promised aim of supporting growth. After an FDF report this week blamed a bombardment of taxation and regulation for a drastic fall in food business confidence, this could be the issue that either makes or breaks industry support for Reed’s new coalition.

“We are yet to see any detail of how the strategy will bring growth to the sector and that has to be the key, rather than simply imposing more regulation and lumping yet more costs on the industry”, says one source.

BRC director of food Andrew Opie is urging ministers to build on the work of the industry’s resilience group, formed under the last government, with Booths MD Nigel Murray as chair. “I really hope that is right at the top of the agenda,” says Opie. “Nigel has put together a brilliant group and has done great work on how we can build resilience as a food industry. It’s vital the government finds a place for that in the strategy.”

Opie also fears the food strategy could end up being detached from other key initiatives, including the circular economy taskforce and the farming roadmap.

“In our view, the food strategy should have all these areas at its heart, otherwise there is a danger that the government will not be able to have the cross-government approach it has indicated is so important.”

Other groups have very different priorities. Ben Reynolds, director of green policy think tank IEEP UK, says what environmental and health campaigners want most is for the food strategy to have teeth in the form of legislation, after “years and years of failed voluntary initiatives”.

“We welcome the Government announcing so soon within coming to power its intention to create a new food strategy,” he says. “The failure of previous strategies also points to the need for this government to look to regulation to provide lasting impact and the certainty that food system players, particularly businesses need in order to create a level playing field.

“Key to this is implementing the recommendations in Dimbleby’s Strategy – including a Food Bill, which could include targets for improving the food system, such as public sector procurement.

“Effective oversight will be crucial, including expanding the core Food Strategy Advisory Board to ensure it better reflects the diversity of those with the best potential to deliver on the government’s four priorities.

“The establishment of a ministerial oversight group to ensure cross-departmental buy-in is smart, and should be complemented by appointing a body to hold government to account on delivering its commitments.”

It was always going to be impossible for the government to please everyone with its new strategy. Its big challenge now will be showing enough leadership to hold together a potentially fragile alliance of parties with differing interests, who may agree on the big challenges, but often not on how they should be tackled.