Nick Smith – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Energy and Climate Change

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Nick Smith on 2016-05-23.

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, what the annual budget is for food produced for her Department’s offices; and what proportion of food produced for her Department was sourced from British producers in the last period for which figures are available.

Andrea Leadsom

The Department of Energy and Climate Change does not have an annual food budget. Catering services are provided via a DEFRA contract which is operated on a nil subsidy basis.

Annual spend is determined by the contractor and is informed by private sales to members of staff.

Forty-eight percent of food and drink provided through this contract is sourced from UK producers (based on figures for Jan-Mar 2016). This proportion reflects that a large volume of food and drink sold to staff includes non-indigenous products such as rice, pasta, tea, coffee and bananas, and that as this period falls in the Winter season there are out of UK seasonal products procured from the wider EU.

One hundred percent of beef, chicken, lamb, pork, free range eggs, milk and yoghurt is sourced from the UK.