Claudia Webbe – 2022 Speech on the National Food Strategy and Food Security
The speech made by Claudia Webbe, the Independent MP for Leicester East, in the House of Commons on 27 October 2022.
I thank the right hon. Member for Tatton (Esther McVey) and the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) for proposing this important debate, and the Backbench Business Committee for granting it.
The first job of Government is to keep people safe and well. No debate on food strategy and food security is worth its name if the issue of hunger within this country caused by the UK’s gross structural inequality is not addressed. In the UK, in September, 4 million children did not have enough to eat—that is one out of every four households with children. About 3 million of those children have working parents and still face hunger, according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. An even higher number, one in three of our children, live in poverty and could tip into hunger at any moment. At the same time in our country, one in seven adults—about 8 million people—were forced to miss meals because they could not afford food as well as other essentials.
In my constituency, 42% of children have been living in poverty, a percentage that will only have risen as household bills rocket. The UN special rapporteur for extreme poverty visited the UK only four years ago and was shocked at what he saw then. He said that the issues of poverty, hunger and inequality were not expensive to fix, and that the Government could easily put them right if they chose to. Instead, the situation has been allowed to become much worse. Some would say that it has been knowingly accelerated. No food strategy adopted by the Government that does not address these issues is fit for purpose.
Equally, if the national food strategy does not protect the most vulnerable in society from food price increases, it may do more harm than good. There is no guarantee that the corporate giants in the food industry will not pass on tax costs to consumers. The Government must take steps to ensure that these businesses are not simply passing the cost of any future tax on sugar or salt on to consumers in order to maintain profits to pay excessive shareholder dividends and senior staff bonuses. There is no honour in making the poor pay for the rich.
The Government’s obligations under the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights states that citizens must have access to affordable food without compromising other basic needs. But we already know that people are forced to compromise—forced to choose between eating or heating their homes. What work has been done to assess the imposition of a regulatory obligation on supermarkets, which wield incredible power, so as to protect the price of food staples to provide quality, nutritious foods to consumers on a cost recovery-only basis? I hope that the Minister can advise on the work that has been done in that regard. The Government have the power to stop allowing the UK to be a food bank nation and to stop forcing citizens to make such choices. The nation’s poverty and hunger is a political choice made here.
The hon. Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne) is running a campaign for adequate nutrition to be recognised as a human right in the UK, which would force the Government to take responsibility for ensuring that everyone in this country is well fed, regardless of their financial circumstances. This is a duty that this Government have shamefully neglected—just ask any teacher how many of their pupils come to school hungry each morning and struggle to study as a result, which damages their prospects of any kind of improvement in their situation.
My constituents will want to know why the Government are allowing this situation not only to continue but to explode, and why having enough to eat and decent wages to allow people to feed their children is not a human right in this country. Tragically for such people, under this Government the disaster is only set to get worse. Ultimately, I believe that the primary recommendation of the national food strategy must be to make healthy food available to the nation on supermarket shelves, priced without profit and on a cost-recovery basis only, in order to honour the Government’s obligation to ensure that everyone has the right to food.
