Prioritising British Produce: Public Bodies
1/39. What steps he is taking to encourage public bodies to prioritise the purchase of British produce.
The new national procurement policy statement sets out requirements for Government contracts, and favours high-quality products that we believe British producers are very well placed to supply. This will support our ambition to ensure that half of the food supplied for public sector catering comes from local producers, or those certified to higher environmental standards.
I welcome the Minister’s commitment to ensuring that 50% of public procurement is of British produce. Given the significant £5 billion of bargaining power that this represents, what steps is he taking to ensure that this leads to fairer prices for farmers and supports the fundamental operating profitability of the sector?
I am grateful for the question from my hon. Friend. We are absolutely determined to make the best of this opportunity, not least because the previous Government did not know how much we were actually buying. The Secretary of State has announced that we will monitor the food bought in the public sector, and that will inform our policy of making sure that British farmers make the most of the opportunity for public procurement.
I call the Chair of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee.
The Secretary of State, in her speech to the Oxford farming conference, spoke about the plan for change, which was going to include a commitment to public sector procurement, but that was in January, and we are now in March. With the closure of the basic payment scheme and the ending of the sustainable farming incentive, farm incomes are under real cash pressure in the here and now, so when will we hear more detail about the very welcome commitments that the Secretary of State made at the Oxford farming conference in January?
As I said in response to my hon. Friend the Member for St Austell and Newquay (Noah Law), the first thing we needed to do was establish how much we are actually buying, and that is now in progress. I absolutely get the point about the urgency. The question is why doing this took the previous Government so long when they shared our ambition. We are determined to make this happen.