John Healey MP, recently appointed Chancellor of the Exchequer in Andy Burnham’s new government, came out swinging this week with an exclusive interview in The Sun on Sunday to declare his intent to go further than ever in supporting British businesses with money spent by the state.
The Chancellor told the newspaper:
“We will make every government department a growth department – backing Britain. You will see this as a determined drive that you have not seen before from a British government.
“Buying British not if possible, but by design. So every procurement pound supports British jobs, British apprenticeships and British skills. Driving wealth creation so the policy decisions we take in government help raise levels of investment and profit and innovation in British business.”
Questions are already being asked about how government departments can accomplish this while still following rules set by Britain’s international agreements – primarily our membership of the World Trade Organisation – and avoiding compromising British firms that export to foreign government buyers.
Supposing these concerns can be overcome, however, the proposal has attractions. A key question for rural communities is whether it will mean concrete steps towards the Labour Party’s 2024 manifesto pledge that at least half of all food bought and served by the public sector will be either British or produced to equivalent environmental standards.
Last year, the Countryside Alliance conducted a major information gathering exercise asking 19 central government departments, 215 local authorities and the British Armed Forces what steps they are taking to procure more UK and local food and to monitor the origins of the food they serve. Our report, Backing British? Benchmarking public food procurement, found that the government has a long way to go.
Only one government department had a policy relevant to the procurement of British food. Only one other could say what proportion of its procured food originated in the UK, alongside only 12% of councils. Most had no relevant policy or gave no valid response.
It was in that context that nearly a year ago the Alliance seized upon a consultation from the Cabinet Office on updating procurement rules to support critical British industries. As we pointed out, the government had since adopted the line that “food security is national security” which, if true, makes the case for supporting British food and farming through procurement spending on its own. We were therefore deeply disappointed when, in March, the government published its list of the sectors that would be defined as ‘critical’ to benefit from the new rules – and food and farming were nowhere to be found.
We return, therefore, to this week’s announcement and the question of whether this time, the government genuinely means to go further. As our report argued, the government cannot show progress towards any target without first knowing where it stands. Nor can it expect the public sector to make progress without driving it from the centre.
That means, the first step must be to understand the state of play: to establish who the purchasers are, what if any policies they use to promote British food procurement, and what obligations they are under to identify, record and report the origins of the food they buy. Then, it must impose the relevant requirements on all parts of the public sector – not just central government departments.
The Countryside Alliance agrees with the government that food security is an essential component of national security. The Chancellor’s drive to “buy British” must now turn that recognition into action.