PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Food: Charities (15 October 2021)

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether his Department has taken recent steps to help ensure that fresh, nutritious, unsold food is diverted to charities supporting vulnerable families.

Asked by:
Feryal Clark (Labour)

The safe and speedy redistribution of surplus food is a priority, be it from retail, manufacture or the hospitality and food service sector, which all may have their own issues and challenges in their supply chains. Defra supports a range of action to overcome these challenges, reduce food waste and help get more surplus food to charities.

Since 2017 Defra has made a series of grants available to help the redistribution sector. In total nearly £12m has been awarded to over 250 large and small redistribution organisations across the country for the provision of for example warehousing, vehicles, fridges and freezers.

We continue to support WRAP and the Courtauld 2030 redistribution working group that seeks to overcome barriers to redistribution. The most recent outputs from the group is the publication of new guidance on storing surplus food; best practice on redistributing own brand products and the tool Framework for Effective Redistribution.

We remain committed to the WRAP led Food Waste Reduction Roadmap which supports business to target, measure and specifically act on reducing food waste for instance by making sure food surplus is redistributed.

The amount of surplus food redistributed in 2020, over 92,000 tonnes, was worth £280 million and was the equivalent of 220 million meals. Since UK-level data was first reported in 2015, overall levels of redistribution have increased three-fold.

Answered by:
Jo Churchill (Conservative)
25 October 2021