The letter that confirms the Cinderella status of the public plate

Kevin Morgan

DEFRA convened the first meeting of its new Food Strategy Advisory Board on March 26.

If the creation of the board was welcomed across the food policy community, its composition generated some concerns.

Henry Dimbleby told Radio 4’s Farming Today programme that its membership was heavily slanted towards the food industry, which constitutes half of all the members.

Sustain, the alliance for better food and farming, said it was disappointing to see so little representation from civil society, public health, environment, and local food partnerships.

But no one seems to have complained about the most glaring absence of all – the public sector food community. These are the professionals in catering, procurement and food service who cater for the public plate, which nourishes some of the most vulnerable people in society, like children, patients and prisoners for example.

Lowly status

The fact that few noticed this glaring absence speaks volumes for the lowly status under which the public food sector has laboured for so long.

Many of the professionals in this sector are organised under the common banner of the Public Sector Catering (PSC) Alliance.

The Alliance and its members are well used to being excluded from the top table of food policy discussions.

For example, the Alliance has sought a seat at the table of the Food and Drink Sector Council (FDSC), the main body that represents the food system from farm to fork in the corridors of power. Time and again DEFRA has rejected its application. In the most recent rejection letter of March 8 2024, the Minister for Food, Farming and Fisheries, Mark Spencer MP, wrote the following:

“…Public sector catering is currently represented at FDSC with Robin Mills as a member, who is the CEO of Compass Group UK & Ireland. We took careful consideration of your application to become a member of the council last year and continue to appreciate your engagement. The membership of the council is set up to provide a balance of individuals from across different types of businesses and regions across the supply chain to bring a variety of perspectives to the FDSC, including within the foodservice sector…”.

I honestly can’t think of a better illustration of the Cinderella status of the public sector food community than this rejection letter.

Extraordinary

The most extraordinary aspect of the letter is the notion that the CEO of Compass Group UK and Ireland, part of the world’s largest private sector food service company, was deemed to be the authentic voice of public sector food provisioning.

I’ve written to DEFRA to respectfully ask if they’ll reverse this decision and invite the PSC Alliance to be a member of the FDSC.

In my letter I suggested that there were two good reasons for DEFRA to have a rethink:

We have a new government, and a change of heart would be an easy and costless way to signal to the public sector food community that it was a valued member of the FDSC;

We also have a new chair of the PSC Alliance, in the form of Jayne Jones, and she is widely regarded as a highly credible ambassador for the public sector as she has experience of working in both local government and the NHS.

DEFRA will need to harness all the energy and talent it can muster if it is to fashion a food system that provides affordable, healthier and more climate friendly food. And how does DEFRA hope to get more locally produced food into public sector institutions without involving public sector professionals and the £5bn a year public food procurement budget?

Expertise

The expertise of the public sector will also be needed if the issues identified by the Quince Review of public sector food procurement are to be addressed. The recommendations of that review included the following:

1. Unify and mandate standards across the whole of the public sector
2. Update and strengthen the Government Buying Standards for Food and Catering Services
3. Encourage innovation and uptake of best practice in procurement by supporting assurance schemes like Food for Life
4. Establish clear metrics for assessing compliance with standards and create strong reporting mechanisms
5. Improve accessibility to procurement for SMEs and farmers by supporting public sector caterers and procurement officers
6. Review the procurement approach for the School Fruit and Vegetable Scheme to maximise access to SMEs and farmers
7. Ensure school food quality by increasing the school meal allowance and ringfencing school food budgets

Daniel Zeichner, the Minister for Food Security and Rural Affairs, chairs the board and he’ll have his work cut out for him, not least because he needs the active support of his colleagues in many other departments if the ‘cross-government food strategy’ is to survive the transition from rhetoric to reality.

In its press release, DEFRA said that the “Food Strategy Advisory Board will bring together senior leaders from across the food system”. But if this process is to be truly inclusive, DEFRA will need to reflect seriously on who it invites to advise it, and include a public sector leader like Jayne Jones.

Kevin Morgan is Professor of Governance and Development at Cardiff University and the author of Serving the Public: the good food revolution in schools, hospitals and prisons (Manchester University Press).