Every year, more than a billion meals’ worth of good food goes to waste in the UK: fresh, edible surplus that never makes it to a plate. This would be enough to feed every child in the UK for a month. As a group of CEOs from the community redistribution sector, we believe more needs to be done to rescue it.
That is why we welcome the National Programme to Redistribute Surplus Food. Announced by former prime minister Keir Starmer in May, it sets out a plan to triple the amount of food we redistribute over the next 10 years. While it is hugely important that redistribution is not seen as a way to solve food insecurity, it does play a part in reducing food waste and the harm it does to the environment. It can also be used as a tool to enhance local communities, helping them to improve health and wellbeing.
That is why, our sector, which includes City Harvest, Community Shop, The Bread and Butter Thing, His Church, Felix, Feeding Britain, Neighbourly and the wider Xcess Network, is committed to making that happen, and is supported by allies like anti-poverty charity and community of food banks Trussell. We know no single organisation can do this alone, the government, business and philanthropy each have a distinct part to play.
It’s an exciting time and we are all fielding lots of questions about what this programme means. This is an undertaking characterised by its ambition and scale and we do not have all the answers yet. We do, however, have a five-point plan as a sector to get things moving in the right direction:
- Work together to source more food and create a joined-up network that is reactive to the changing and unpredictable nature of surplus food
- Greater collaboration on regional infrastructure, with organisations working to share data, resources and volunteers, and build coordinated last-mile delivery
- Process more food through innovation and investment in cooking, canning, freezing, juicing and baking to create a consistent supply of food in usable, longer life and convenient formats
- Build a shared supply chain, to ensure less duplication or differing technologies across the UK, so suppliers have the same experiences from Shetland to Penzance
- Use food to create social value, turning into a community asset that lets thousands of local groups and local people make full use of it
This isn’t only a job for the charity sector. If we’re serious about tripling redistribution, food businesses need to change how they see surplus. Getting edible food to communities must become the default: ahead of animal feed, anaerobic digestion and disposal.
It must be in line with the government’s food waste hierarchy, which at the moment it is not. That means a factory treating a batch that fails quality control as something to save, not scrap, and a wholesaler rescuing mislabelled stock rather than writing it off. It means engaging with one national system, building on what the Coronation Food Project and the Alliance Food Sourcing model, developed with IGD and industry partners, have already shown works. And it means reporting surplus honestly, so we can see what’s genuinely unavoidable and what isn’t.
What we need from government
We will need philanthropists and funders too, to give the sector the long-term, patient funding it needs to build this infrastructure properly. And we need government to change the policy that determines whether donating food makes financial sense.
We’re asking for five things: a successor to the Farm Gate scheme, a fund covering the direct costs businesses face when they redistribute surplus; Corporation Tax reform, so businesses can claim deductions for donated food; food redistribution written into Environmental Land Management Schemes and embedded in the Food and Circular Economy Strategies; redistribution built properly into food policy architecture across all four nations; and mandatory food waste reporting, so we finally have the data to see where the surplus in the system is.
That’s a lot to ask, and we know it. But we believe it’s achievable. We’ve already taken the first step ourselves: we’ve agreed a covenant to collaborate, and we’re signing it across the sector now, because working together means more food reaches more people. The surplus is there. There’s enough to go round. Rescuing it isn’t just good for the planet. It’s good for people, and it’s good for the communities we all want to see thrive.
Written on behalf of the industry by Steve Butterworth, CEO of Neighbourly; Gary Stott, executive chairman at Community Shop CoC; Vic Harper, CEO at The Bread and Butter Thing; Charlotte Hill, CEO at Felix; Richard Humphrey, operations director at His Church Charity; Andrew Forsey, national director at Feeding Britain; and Richard Gammage, CEO at City Harvest London
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