PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Poverty: Food Costs - 1 March 2023 (Commons/Westminster Hall)

I beg to move,

That this House has considered the matter of tackling poverty and the cost of food.

It is a pleasure to serve for the first time under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I thank my colleagues for turning up today; there is very good attendance and I am sure they are all going to be very supportive.

The world’s farmers produce enough food on this planet to feed 1.5 times the global population. It is enough food to feed 10 billion people; there are currently about 7.6 billion people on the planet. In the UK we waste about 10 million tonnes of food every year, and yet we have seen a reported increase in food bank use. Takeaway sales are up year on year; the market is set to reach £23 billion this year, with us British people spending an average of £641 a year on takeaway food—and yet we see a rise in food bank use. We have a big obesity problem in the UK, and it is spiralling out of control. It is costing our NHS a massive £6 billion annually. That is set to rise to £9.7 billion each year by 2050—and yet we see a significant increase in food bank use.

No one should go hungry in the UK—we know that. We produce enough food across the world to wipe out global hunger.

That is a very kind invitation and I will do my very best to attend—thank you for that. Like I said, 40% of food goes to waste; that is 2.5 billion tonnes that we throw away each year on this planet. If that food was given to the people who need it, we could give chronically undernourished—[Interruption.]

To recap, I was talking about the amount of food wasted, not only throughout the world but more specifically in the UK. The UK has cut down its food waste in recent years, but we still throw away far too much edible food. The UK creates 9.52 million tonnes of food waste per year, according to the Waste and Resources Action Programme—WRAP, for short.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. I am going to speak about big stores such as Asda later, but the hon. Gentleman is quite right that they are doing their bit at the moment—I would like to see them do a little bit more.

A lot of the wasted food is disposed of during the manufacturing process. Some is disposed of by the retail and hospitality sectors, but a big chunk of waste comes from households all over the country, which are throwing away food on a daily basis.

I will certainly give way.

I thank the hon. Member for her intervention, and she makes a good point. I am not fortunate enough to get Scottish TV where I live; we do not quite get the signal. Yes, there is a problem in the agricultural sector with seasonal workers. I did have a solution, but I was shouted down when I first got to this place. We have 90,000 people languishing in jails in this country, and we are about 90,000 people short for picking fruit and vegetables. I think that would be a good start. If we have a labour shortage, we need to look inwards.

I will move on. The hospitality sector alone tosses away about £3.2 billion of food a year, according to WRAP. Households could cause 70% of the UK’s food waste, throwing away about 6.6 million tonnes of food, of which 4.5 million tonnes is actually edible. That is far too much, especially at a time when nearly 70% of UK households are worried about their energy prices; I am worried about my energy prices. Some people think it may mean they are not able to buy enough food to carry on, according to the Food Foundation.

Overall, 6.4 million tonnes of completely edible food is thrown away every year. I think that is criminal. The consumable food that we waste costs the UK about £19 billion a year, which adds up to £284 for every single person in this country. Households alone get rid of edible food worth £13.8 billion. If we split that between all the UK’s 28.1 million households, each home would save £491 per year. Food waste presents a significant problem due to the volume of waste produced each year. In fact, it is estimated that in the UK alone, we throw away around 9.5 million tonnes of food waste annually, most of which will end up in an already overcrowded landfill.

Every day, I get emails and messages on social media from people saying that we have starving children in the UK, and that we voted not to feed schoolchildren. That is dangerous and misleading.

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. There is a myth in this country that if people are on universal credit, they are in poverty. I will dispel that myth right now. We have people—not just in my constituency, but all over the country—who are on universal credit, but have a household income of more than £40,000 a year. Now that is not poverty. If people in London on universal credit work a few hours, there is a loophole in the universal credit system meaning they can top up their wages by £30,000-odd a year. That is not poverty. Being on universal credit alone is not an indicator that a family are in poverty, so I totally dismiss that idea.

But I do admit that some families in this country are struggling, and they need our support. A few months back, I visited a school in Ashfield after concerned parents contacted me because the breakfast club had been stopped. The school had stopped providing free breakfasts because the private funding it had secured had run out. Those parents were concerned not about their own children, but about the more disadvantaged children from the poorer families in the area. So I contacted the school and asked what I thought was a reasonable question: “Why are you giving every single child a breakfast in the morning?” I did not get a breakfast, and my kids got a breakfast at home, so it is something new to me. The school told me that people were struggling to feed their own children at home.

I also asked if the school had asked for a donation from any of the families. The families I was speaking to wanted to make a donation to the school, but it said no. When I asked why, it could not answer me. Then I asked, “Why are some families unable to feed their children at breakfast? Why can’t they give them a slice of toast or whatever?” The school struggled to answer me. Eventually, it said, “Well, it’s the cost of living crisis, isn’t it?” I thought, “How much does Weetabix and a bowl of milk cost?” Not even the 30p that I’m famous for—it probably costs a lot less than that.

I wanted to help, so I went on to ask if I could meet the parents who were struggling, to give the whole holistic approach and see where they were going wrong, if we could help and if they had debt, budgeting or social problems. That was nearly four months ago, and I have still heard nothing back. Why have I got nothing back? I’ll tell you for why: there is a reluctance in certain parts of this country, now, about getting to the root of the problem. It is far too easy to say that there is a cost of living crisis. Yes, we know that people are struggling, that food prices are up and that energy prices are up. We know all that, but we cannot keep throwing taxpayers’ money at people. That is what it is: it is taxpayers’ money—our money, our constituents’ money.

I will gladly give way.

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. Yes, I do live in the real world. When I talk about these things in this place, I am talking on behalf of my friends, family, neighbours and constituents. I will take no lectures from anybody in this place about living in a deprived area.

I will gladly give way.

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. I might say that if her mother had had a first-class Conservative MP like myself, maybe she would have been more comfortable coming for that advice. [Interruption.] It’s true.

I speak as a former adviser for a citizens advice bureau; I worked there for about 10 years. If hon. Members want to know about poverty, come and have a chat with me, because I saw these people on a daily basis. The people I used to see came with all sorts of problems—social problems, debt problems, benefits problems—and a lot of them had to rely on food banks. The first thing we used to do was go through an income and expenditure sheet with the service users. In most cases, there were lots of savings to be made. These people had not had the best start in life, a lot of them, and they needed help—a bit of education and a bit of support—with their bills and debts. They were paying ridiculous Provident loans off at high interest rates. They needed support; what they did not need was money thrown at them. Ten years later—it took me 10 or 15 years to learn this—I was seeing the sons and daughters of those families, who were coming to see me with the same problems that mum and dad had had 10 years before. We were not actually breaking the cycle; we were not supporting people.

I did a bit of work with my local food bank last year, as hon. Members will probably be aware—it was reported in some newspapers. I was delivering meals from the food bank to vulnerable families with an award-winning local chef; he works at a really good restaurant. After a few days of delivering meals, he said to me, “This is totally wrong. These people need proper help. They need teaching how to budget and how to cook a meal from scratch.” What we learned at the food bank was that people could not make a meal from scratch. They were struggling to cook a vegetable properly—to batch cook, to freeze stuff. He gave me a challenge. He said to me, “I can feed a family of five for 50 quid a week.” I said, “No, that’s nonsense. That’s rubbish—you can’t do that.” He said, “I’ll challenge you.”

So we went to the food bank and got the people invited to the college. There were schoolchildren there, as well as four MPs, including me, and the chef, and there were also some TV people. The day before, I got £50 and went with some schoolchildren to the local Aldi with a shopping list from the chef. The next day, we went back to the college, batch cooked five different meals and put everything in little packs, which we put away and delivered later to vulnerable families. And it worked out at 30p per meal.

I am not saying that people can cook on that scale at home—that is ridiculous—but what we are trying to prove is that if you learn how to cook from scratch, you get the right ingredients and you batch cook, you can save a hell of a lot money and make nutritious meals on a budget. Obviously, after that I was tagged as “30p Lee”. I don’t mind, because every time it comes up, somebody asks me, “Why do they call you 30p Lee?” When I tell them, they completely understand—so keep firing away and calling me 30p Lee.

Funnily enough, after this exercise I wrote to every single Labour MP inviting them to my food bank and to take part in it. I got two or three dismissive responses, but nobody else bothered to reply. The challenge was there, but nobody bothered to come.

What upsets me—this gets to me a little bit—is that there is a culture in some deprived areas where people are so dependent on food banks that it is like a weekly shop for them. One particular family who I was really trying to help were going to the food bank two or three times a week to get their groceries, but then I would see them in McDonald’s two or three times a week. My goodness. I do not want to stop little children going for a treat once in a while, but this is all about priorities. If you are really struggling for money and are going to a food bank two or three times a week, you should not be going out for fast food and getting takeaways every week. I know people are going to start sighing and ah-ing and saying, “He’s wicked and he’s cruel,” but those are the facts.

I never went for a McDonald’s when I was a kid, and I come from poverty. My mum and dad really struggled to feed us. He was a coalminer who worked seven days a week, and my mother was a factory worker. At the weekends, my dad did his garden. We had vegetables in there from top to bottom, and it also had chickens, rabbits and ducks. That was our food bank. We had nowhere else to go—that is what we did. We provided for ourselves. We have lost that over the past 20, 30 and 40 years, but we need to remind ourselves of where we have come from and to have those traditional values that our parents had. Food banks are being abused;  I know that, because constituents tell me every single day about people making it up, telling lies or whatever. Food banks are abused by people who do not need them. We should target the food banks.

You can shake your head all you want. [Interruption.]

Thank you, Mr Dowd, and I do apologise. I get passionate about this subject, which is very close to my heart.

Ashfield, Mansfield and Bolsover are deprived areas. Many of the red wall seats are very deprived. They are deprived for a reason—we all know why, but I am not going to go into that now. We are going to see more and more fast food outlets—McDonald’s, KFC and others—springing up everywhere. They are springing up every 10 minutes in my area alone. Why are they coming to these deprived areas? It is because they know that there is a market there. We say that poorer people tend to use these places, and I know that that is true.

Food bank use is increasing in places such as Ashfield, yet obesity is also increasing in the same poor areas. Why is that? What we need is a proper food strategy in this country; I do not think we have had one for years. We have not had one since the 1970s. [Interruption.] You can laugh, giggle and scoff, but that is true. Why was it that in the 1970s, in the schools that I went to and all over Nottinghamshire, there were no obese children and we were fit and healthy? We did not have much money, but we ate less junk food and had a better diet and healthier lifestyles.

Maybe it was a poor choice of words. What I meant was that we have not had that proper culture in this country for decades—that personal responsibility of feeding ourselves. I like to hark back to the days when I was growing up, because they are on my mind at this moment in time. We were a lot poorer; we had less money and less food, but we seemed to manage okay. I think we could all do a little bit more. [Interruption.] Whatever! You can chip away all you want, mate.

I hear this nonsense about junk food and processed food being cheaper than fresh food. It is not. The chefs who I speak to say that is absolute rubbish. You can still go and buy a big bag of veg for a couple of quid, and a bit of meat, and make wholesome, nutritious meals and batch cook. I have done that before. Parents have done that before. We can do it with a little bit of effort, education and training. People always bleat on about the Government.

We had that problem with our food bank, which I helped out at. We were giving people vouchers to put the gas and electric on their meters. Then we had a complaint that they did not have any pots or pans, so we gave them pots and pans to make their food with. Then we had a complaint that they did not have a fridge or a cooker. Then we showed them how to apply for white goods, energy support grants and stuff like that through their utility companies. So there is no excuse.

We could go on and make excuses all day. We live in a great country, and there is a lot of support out there to get all these things—not just food, but the stuff to cook it in and help with energy bills. This Government have provided billions of pounds of support over the past two years, especially through covid. They have spent over £500 billion of taxpayers’ money.

I will close now because I know quite a few people want to speak. I will finish by going back to the “30p Lee” thing. It comes up every single day on social media. I made a little list earlier of celebrity chefs—millionaire chefs—who can make meals on a budget. Lesley Negus can make a meal for 20p. Jack Monroe can make a meal for 20p. The website frugal.org.uk has meals for 25p. Savvy Meals can do meals for under a quid. Even the BBC has recipes for meals under a quid. Jamie Oliver—£1 wonders. Asda has recipes for meals under a quid. Toogoodtogo.com—under a quid.

I mentioned the food blogger, Jack Monroe. She was celebrated last year in the Daily Mirror for producing a meal for a staggering 11p. These people are celebrated; they are national heroes. Yet when a Conservative MP tries to help a local food bank and people in his own community, he is called “30p Lee”. Like I say, it don’t matter to me.

I am not going to bang on. Somebody contacted me today from Derbyshire—not my constituency. She said:

“As a retired foster carer for Derbyshire, I taught our looked after children cooking skills. Batch cooking and storing meals in zippy bags (re-useable) and massively space saving for the storing in a second hand small chest freezer (for £30). Meals that cost pence to make (proven by costing out on a spreadsheet so extra skills learned there!) The key is the motivation to do this type of cooking when you can make the time, but the advantages of convenience and cost speaks for itself. They could feed themselves when independent for £20 a week. Indisputable!!!”

What a great lady!

Will the hon. Lady give way?

I am grateful for the opportunity to respond. I will be very brief. I am little disappointed with some of the divisive comments from the Opposition. I don’t do divisive politics. I like to debate sensibly. It was interesting that I accepted every single intervention, but the Opposition would not accept one. That is what debates should be all about—accepting interventions.

Some of the divisive language was awful. I did not say that “everybody” was abusing the food bank system or that “everybody” who uses a food bank cannot cook or budget—I said, “some people”. We should be very careful with tone and delivery because of tomorrow’s headlines in the papers. It leads to hatred, nastiness and threats. All I am going to say is that the Opposition need to be very careful with the way they speak in this place, because it does lead to some horrible and divisive behaviour.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered the matter of tackling poverty and the cost of food.