The South Coast Food Partnerships message to parliament about the Food Strategy and the importance of Food Partnerships
On 20th July the Sustainable Food Places Network organised a day of action and celebration at Portcullis House to highlight the work of Food Partnerships. Following the success of the day of action, those of us along the South Coast – Brighton & Hove, Eastbourne, Adur & Worthing, Mid-Sussex, Lewes District, and Arun & Chichester – have come together to issue a statement on the Government’s Food Strategy White Paper.
Sustainable Food Places members at the day of action on the 20th July – PHOTO SUSTAINABLE FOOD PLACES
We are disappointed to see that the recent Food Strategy White Paper ignores the recommendation from the National Food Strategy for a Food Partnership and Food Strategy in every area of the UK. The strategy suggests the government would like to ‘learn from’ food partnership approaches, yet makes no commitment to their growth and development across the country. Meanwhile, in Wales the Government has committed investment to a Food Partnership for every county, and the Scottish Government is enshrining the right to food in law. We would like to see a similar level of commitment for the whole of the UK.
Using examples from across the South Coast, we hope this statement helps the government to understand and identify some best practice approaches to strategic food systems working. Given the government’s commitment in the Food Strategy White Paper to learning about what we do, with this statement we extend an invitation to them to come and visit to find out more about our work.
Food systems are complex, as is the work of transforming them. Food touches every area of our lives – our health, environment, finances, culture, and more. Policy and strategic work around food therefore cannot sit within just one department or sector – which is where food partnerships come in, as they provide a forum for coordinated work across different sectors, scales, and levels. The first Food Partnership was formed in Brighton & Hove in 2003 but we are a fast-growing movement – there are now more than 80 Food Partnerships across the UK. Whilst we do not have all the answers, we do believe that the path towards building a food system that is healthy, sustainable, and fair lies in long-term, strategic, and co-ordinated thinking.
How we work:
1) Whole Systems Approach
Food Partnerships champion ‘whole systems approaches’ to our food system, interweaving issues such as food poverty, obesity, ill health, food security, and climate change, aiming for solutions that transform our food and farming system to provide healthy and sustainable food. Across the South Coast we are working on issues such as economic regeneration, poverty, health and climate change, looking at the interfaces between these issues. We do this work in collaboration with public, private and community sectors.
For example, Food Partnerships across the South Coast help run ‘Affordable Food Projects’ – schemes that involve members paying a small monthly fee in exchange for access to fresh, healthy, and affordable food that offers more variety than in food banks, yet provides an option for people on limited budgets. Members of these schemes have reported feeling more connected to one another and the schemes support local producers where possible, meaning shorter supply chains.
Arun & Chichester Food Partnership have managed to get Healthy Start embedded into general benefits training, and have piloted energy advisors in pop-up food pantries which has led to a number of referrals for support from people who wouldn’t otherwise have accessed it.
2) Long-term thinking:
The National Food Strategy notes how we need ‘clear, long-term targets, ongoing political attention, and a joined-up approach not only within Government, but across the food industry and communities’ to solve the issues with our current food system. The current food strategy white paper, however, offers no mention of an action plan, and no mechanisms for accountability. As the Food Foundation have noted, the whole process has lacked a ‘political champion’, with no clear policy narrative as to how to make these changes happen.
Food Partnerships have been at the forefront of releasing cross-sectoral action plans for cities and areas for over fifteen years. Brighton & Hove released their first food strategy action plan in 2006 and their current food strategy has successfully brought together over 100 partners committing to a list of 200 actions aimed at improving the food system. Whilst Brighton & Hove may be the most established, newer Food Partnerships such as Lewes District Food Partnership and Arun & Chichester are conducting food mapping exercises that contribute to an overall understand of the local food system, setting the groundwork for developing action plans. Across the Sustainable Food Places network there are more than 80 places taking this long-term strategic approach to food work.
Places with Food Partnerships and strategies are achieving reductions in childhood obesity, urban regeneration, community cohesion and shorter food supply chains supporting British farming. It is time that government thinking caught up, enacting action plans at national level.
3) Non-political, cross-sectoral collaborations:
Long-term, strategic thinking can be particularly difficult to deliver in a shifting political landscape. As politically neutral organisations, food partnerships help support long-term food systems thinking, as they weather the political storms of parliamentary politics. Food Partnerships map and know their local foodscapes well: they are innovative, rooted in localities, offer longevity and are efficient. Across Sussex they take place in areas of all political colours and have been championed by local authorities of different sizes city, county, district.
These relationships proved crucial in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic – a report from the Food Poverty Campaign in London showed that where councils had local food partnerships, they coordinated extremely effective emergency responses; this can be seen in Brighton & Hove too, where the city’s Food Partnership built on their existing connections across the city to lead the city’s Covid-19 response, travelling at the speed of trust’ to distribute food to vulnerable people across the city.
Similarly, Lewes District Council have recently committed to developing a district wide food security strategy, in conjunction with their local emergency food network. This work was instigated by Lewes District Food Partnership (LDFP), who mapped out emergency food providers across the city and identified barriers to food access (such as digital literacy), playing a crucial role coordinating between the council, voluntary sector, and those in food poverty across the region.
Food Partnerships have rightly been championed for the role they are playing in crisis, playing leading roles in the Covid-19 crisis and now the Cost of Living Crisis. However, their primary focus is to be a mechanism for positive change, and not just a safety net. They need resources so they can focus on using the power of food to achieve a healthier and more sustainable future.
Representatives from Brighton & Hove, Arun & Chichester, Lewes District, and Eastbourne Food Partnerships at Westminster – PHOTO SUSTAINABLE FOOD PLACES
Conclusion
To take the multiple crises we are facing in the world seriously we need to be willing to embrace complexity, taking an approach that sees how issues interconnect. This means understanding that transforming a food system also means interventions such as increasing digital literacy so that people can access food, or intervening in the advertising industry to stop junk food adverts.
Getting to these solutions is a process of bringing people together from a diversity of backgrounds – food bank users to supermarket CEOs – to find these missing gaps. The Food Partnership approach at both a national and local level is perfectly primed to hold this space.
In choosing to ignore the National Food Strategy’s recommendation that every area in the UK has a local Food Partnership delivering a local food action plan, the government is also ignoring the opportunity to invest in the transformative, strategic change we urgently need if we want our food system to be one that is healthy, sustainable, and fair for all.