Rural Affairs, Islands and Natural Environment Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, February 9, 2022

Official Report 736KB pdf

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Good Food Nation (Scotland) Bill: Stage 1

Welcome back, everyone. Under agenda item 5, we will return to taking evidence on the Good Food Nation (Scotland) Bill. Today, we will focus on public bodies. I welcome to the meeting Mike Callaghan, policy manager, Convention of Scottish Local Authorities; Mark Hunter, strategic lead, food and facilities support, East Ayrshire Council; and Jayne Jones, national chair, Assist FM food and drink, Argyll and Bute Council.

Members will note that the bill will place a duty on health boards and local authorities to produce a good food nation plan. The clerks have been unable to secure any witnesses to represent health boards for today’s meeting, which is very disappointing. I have written to all the health boards to invite them to provide written responses to some of the questions that will be posed today. I hope that we can incorporate those responses into our inquiry.

We will now move to questions. We have until approximately 12 o’clock. I will kick off.

What is the witnesses’ understanding of what being a good food nation means? What are your views on whether the bill will enable public authorities to contribute to that ambition?

It is clear that food intersects with many different policy areas, and it is important that a good food nation bill is not considered in isolation, as it should shape food-related legislation and policy in all areas, such as public health, food insecurity, public procurement and agriculture. It should say how it contributes to local communities and reflect not just the current situation but our current and future challenges in respect of policy in the food sector, global price increases, shortages of certain goods, and how it impacts on the public sector purchasing of food by local authorities—for example, how it impacts on school meals and the care sector. It should consider a broad area and should almost be an overarching plan for all food policy. Such a bill certainly has merit, and it should encompass a wide range of food policy areas.

A good food nation is about allowing collaboration between the public sector and the private sector, and how we look at food as a whole, either within the community or nationally. It is about supporting communities to build place-based and sector-led approaches, and looking at how that contributes to a better economy.

For me, a good food nation is one in which we take a local and sustainable systems approach in which our food production is good for people in our communities, the welfare of our animals and, of course, the planet. We want food to support good health, our workforce to be valued for its importance to society, food inequalities to be tackled with no need for emergency food, and access to healthy foods to be much easier. We want people to know more about their food and where it comes from, and public sector food to lead the way in achieving those aims.

I see a good food nation as an important opportunity for us to develop a food system that is less fragmented and more interconnected, and to recognise that climate change, food insecurity, health, good employment, land management and so on are all interrelated and that they all need to be addressed to ensure that everyone in our communities has access to good-quality, local, sustainable and ethical food. Public sector food can be a driver for that change, and it should be an exemplar of good practice that can ignite the systemic change that we need across our communities.

We are already on that journey—we are not at the very beginning of it. We need to recognise the progress that we have already made, but the good food nation agenda gives us the opportunity to do more.

10:45  

I have a supplementary question for Mark Hunter. East Ayrshire Council is held in very high regard as a result of the progress that it has made on food procurement and ensuring good, healthy food. Does the Good Food Nation (Scotland) Bill need to go right down to soil quality and agricultural practices and right through to the end consumer and the nutrition for our elderly in care homes? What is your vision of what the bill or the plan should deliver?

East Ayrshire Council has been on the journey from around 2004, when we started to look at how we could provide support within the local community and to local suppliers. That has an impact on what we can call on to use in food education programmes in our schools, the suppliers that support that, our links with the local community, and how the local community engages in discussions about where we will go forward.

We have very good links with the other food sectors in the local authority area. That links into other things that we need to do and into looking at the social and economic wellbeing of our community. We have to look at the environment to, for instance, enable farmers to produce some of the things that we are looking for on the local produce side, and at how we can develop farmers to be able to deliver those things. If we can get a good food education programme in the schools, we can support the health agenda and, obviously, the economic development of our local community.

Jayne Jones spoke about being on a journey. We have heard evidence that there is a changing culture, as well. What changes in culture have you seen in your local authorities as a result of the decisions that you have made about food? What learnings have you got from the pandemic? How are Scottish Government policies, such the 1,140 hours of free childcare and free school meals, impacting on children in your local authority areas and how you shape your policies?

We have seen a huge amount of change and evolution over the years. As Mark Hunter said, there has been a journey since the early 2000s. We have been able to develop relationships with suppliers, local producers, manufacturers and farmers in our—[Inaudible.]

It has been about taking the time to nurture and build those relationships, develop opportunities for them, and build trust around what public sector food can offer as an opportunity for not just economic growth necessarily but economic stability. We give stability in public sector foods through providing guaranteed volumes, and we pay our bills, for example. It is about being able to talk with people about that and offering them wider opportunities.

A big thing that we have been working on is dividing our procurement opportunities into very small lots so that they are manageable for small suppliers. That allows them to come on board, build confidence, and look at future opportunities. They may wish to apply for future lots and grow beyond that. That can give them access to wider areas for their own supplier development beyond just public sector food. It can give them opportunities to access more restaurants or cafes, for instance.

During the pandemic, there has been a lot of learning about the importance and value of our supply chain and how working with it has been invaluable to reach people across our communities who were in need of food support. I do not think that we could have done any of that without the relationships and partnership working that we already had in place. We were able to work with businesses, not just the suppliers that we rely on day in, day out. We were able to keep them from putting staff on to furlough, for instance, by enabling them to use our relationships to support community food, and we were able to work with retailers and other businesses to provide that support. It is very much about having a holistic mindset about local food and what works in our local areas.

You asked about culture change, bringing our children and young people on board with that, and how we have used changes in policy to support that. The 1,140 hours programme and the fact that children who are in receipt of 1,140 hours of childcare now receive a meal are really important developments. We are able to use that as a means of food education for children at younger ages than ever before. We can teach them how to sit down and enjoy a meal in company with their class. That also introduces them to meals and opportunities for food that they would not necessarily always have, and it is creating a lovely, warm and nurturing food culture. By doing that with two and three-year-olds, we can take children on a journey in which food is just part of the school day and what they are used to every single day as part of their educational experience.

I entirely agree with what Jayne Jones has said.

I will start on the procurement side. It is about starting off small and engaging with local suppliers. That has come to the front during the pandemic. We were able to change quickly by speaking to our suppliers and asking them to supply the kind of food products that we required, both to deliver the food boxes and to keep them supported throughout the pandemic because they had some sort of income coming in. Having that availability worked both ways, for the supplier and us.

With the introduction of the 1,140 hours, we are starting to see a difference in the primary 1s who started in August. We have seen a slight increase in the uptake of meals among the primary 1s in our local authority area. I cannot speak for other local authorities, but we are starting to see that impact. They are used to the food coming in. We know that the tastes of young ones, like those of anybody, change through the years and that we lose them and gain them in certain areas, but we are starting to see the impact of that coming through.

On the food education side, it is very important to use local suppliers to come in and show people where things come from, so that they—including the young ones—understand and recognise the food on their plate.

Could we have COSLA’s view on that question, as well?

My colleagues have covered the matter very well from a local authority perspective. We are aware that local authorities spend roughly £80 million per year on the procurement of food. Those costs are going up, so it is obvious that we need a strategic approach to how local authorities meet those challenges.

I know from a discussion in a recent COSLA community wellbeing board meeting that local authorities and elected members have a great appetite and desire to identify ways in which food can be grown locally, particularly in urban areas, using land that is not used by public organisations, for example, to help to provide the capacity to grow more food locally and contribute to local food supplies. Those are among the ideas and considerations that have been thought of recently.

Mark Hunter and Jayne Jones have set out really well points about good local approaches in Argyll and Bute and East Ayrshire.

I want to discuss targets. I have been talking about that subject over the past few weeks and trying to dig down into it. Everybody seems to have their own specific agenda for the targets that they would like to see.

I have been using the example of obesity, which is not just the consequence of a bad diet or eating too much; a lot of socioeconomic factors come into play. I heard someone say that giving people one hot meal a day could be a target, but if we used a meals on wheels type of service, it might be a meal that just needs to be heated up for five minutes in the microwave or whatever.

My concern is how we ensure that everybody works together and that the targets do not pull the plan apart; the plan should take a holistic view on the good food nation. If we set targets for things that might be consequences of socioeconomic factors—we are looking at a cost-of-living crisis at the moment—will we not set ourselves up to fail? Are we in danger of not seeing the wood for the trees if we get too caught up in setting targets? Should we look more at levers, performance and unintended consequences?

That is an important issue, which we need to delve into quite deeply. There have to be clear outcomes and indicators in place so that we can see our direction of travel towards the state to which we aspire through the bill. You have outlined clearly some of the socioeconomic implications. The headline outcomes and indicators need to clearly state how food relates to the wider policy outcomes, including the national outcomes to which we are committed on the environment, education, the economy and so on.

Targets can help to keep us on track, and there is merit in having some high-level measures in place, but I do not think that what gets measured automatically gets done. That does not apply to food in the same way as it does to other areas that can be measured. One of the reasons for that is that, as you said, measures can sometimes be distracting. We need to think about quality over measures. That is important. When it comes to comparing food provision with other commodities that can be measured, quality is of real value.

For example, there are absolutely no measures relating to public sector food, school meals or food purchasing in the local government benchmarking framework, but that does not mean that we are not working hard to improve the services that we provide every day. Mark Hunter and I have talked about some of the progress that we have made, and that is without having rigorous benchmarks and targets to achieve. Indeed, sometimes, having too many or too rigorous targets can be a barrier to safe implementation and to effective service delivery.

There should be some measures in place to determine what success looks like. Local action plans will be critical for local communities in designing exactly how they will achieve that. Not all local authorities are starting off in the same place, and the same could probably be said for health boards and other public bodies. We need to be sure that no one will be left behind if we set targets that are simply not deliverable. There should also be collaboration, and the plans should overlap and talk to one another to ensure that we do not leave people behind.

There could be stretch targets and aspirations for the percentage of Scottish food that is procured or the percentage of organic food that is used, for example. They are useful tools that I have heard being talked about in previous evidence sessions, but they should be only one part of a suite of other enablers to drive improvement. It should not just be about targets and measures.

I agree with everything that Jayne Jones has said. I always worry that, if we set targets, people will, in some cases, not be able to reach them. I agree that outcomes are probably better. We are all at different stages of this journey. East Ayrshire Council and Argyll and Bute Council, among others, have been working on the issue for quite a long time, and there have been those engagements. We have different teams around us that support engagements in the community, and we have an overlapping connection with our partners and other colleagues in the council. A process—that is a better word that I would like to use—needs to be set for how other local authorities move forward with us, so that they are not left behind, as Jayne Jones said.

11:00  

The point about whether we use targets or outcomes is really interesting. When East Ayrshire Council started on its journey and employed the hungry for success programme, I remember very clearly that it went all out to ensure that it did all the things to meet the gold standard. I know that Argyll and Bute Council did the same, but other local authorities chose not to go down the same road. Are our current food procurement practices a hindrance? Does the national plan need to ensure that local authorities employ their own local plan so that there is take-up and it is not really voluntary, if that makes sense? I might not be being clear in what I am saying. I will come to Mark Hunter first.

Do you mean local procurement?

Yes.

We started off slowly, and the work was led by Robin Gourlay in 2008 in association with local suppliers. It is about recognising the capability of suppliers and what is in your area. We are quite fortunate in East Ayrshire that we have quite a lot of suppliers in the area that we can call on and use. It is about engaging with them and asking whether they would be interested in such a scheme should it come to light. That is probably the more difficult bit, because small and medium-sized enterprises and small suppliers are frightened of the procurement process. It is about understanding the procurement process, having the prior information notices and asking questions, but the suppliers should also be allowed to ask questions should they have any issues with going through the process.

I understand that it is difficult for a small producer to go to a local authority. Do the current public procurement practices allow for SMEs and smaller producers to be brought in? Should the national plan say that local authorities must have such engagement to provide the good food nation objectives?

If reference was made to supporting the local community or community wealth building, that might allow local authorities to look at their procurement, but I do not think that it should be mandatory for them to go down the local procurement route, as that would be difficult for some local authorities in some cases. However, they should look at local procurement. Some local authorities use SMEs in their areas, even though they use the Brakes and the 3663s of the world for the bulk of their food products. It would be difficult, in some cases, for some local authorities to use local procurement, so I do not think that it should be mandatory.

There is a huge risk in mandating that type of work. The current approach to public sector procurement allows the flexibility that we need to engage with food and drink manufacturers, producers, suppliers and farmers across Scotland and to build relationships. That takes time and resource, and not everyone has the time and resource to build those relationships, talk to people at farm gates, build trust and get people involved in the process.

We need to recognise that, in some local authority areas, access to a range of food and drink producers is much easier than it is in others. The committee has heard evidence about the difficulties in Glasgow, as there are so few food manufacturers and food businesses in the city. How can Glasgow City Council learn from and replicate the approach that is taken by local authorities such as East Ayrshire Council? The cities and smaller, more urban local authorities would have real challenges in producing food in their areas. How we connect these things is part of the challenge and is what we need to look at.

Wholesalers can be part of the solution and should not always be seen as part of the problem. We have done some great work with our wholesale association—the large wheels of the operation, if you like. Wholesalers can enable local Scottish produce to be delivered to other local authority areas. Local plans and the national plan should give us the flexibility to deliver some of what is in the framework, but the current procurement guidance already permits some of that to happen.

In an ideal world, more fruit and vegetables would be grown in Glasgow so that the supply chain could be shortened. NPF4 would then become important.

Absolutely.

I am aware that the duty to publish and report on plans will have a human resource and financial impact on local authorities and other public bodies, which are already very stretched. Are the anticipated costs in the financial memorandum realistic? Should the costs be met through additional Scottish Government funding, and should that funding be ring fenced? I will address those questions to Mike Callaghan first, but if anyone else wants to come in, that would be great.

Those are very good questions. In our view, the financial memorandum does not identify any funding for the on-going delivery of plans for the good food nation. Local authorities will be critical to the delivery of the bill’s aspirations, so they must be fully funded to develop the plans and deliver on the actions and commitments. Committee members will be aware that local authority budgets have been eroded over quite a number of years, so it is a key imperative that local authorities have sufficient funding to take the bill’s provisions forward in a positive way.

The resource needs to be funded. There has to be an element of funding for anything that we are being asked to do to support the policy and the legislation. We need to look at what would be funded and how it would be funded to support the policy.

For me, the biggest issue is how we deliver the ambition. Without adequate resource, the plan will ultimately become a piece of paper with ambitions on it. The hard part is how we bring the plan to life. How do we ensure that we have someone to meet farmers, suppliers and producers? How do we ensure that we have someone to spend time dealing with food insecurity and developing local solutions to the challenges that people face? How do we ensure that we have someone who can provide the educational and community food opportunities to create change in our communities?

Some of that work is going on in small pockets, but drawing it together and doing more of it across Scotland will take time and resource. We would love nothing more than to have local food in all schools and care homes and to develop opportunities to work in areas of growth, but capacity is the issue. We can only do so much with good will and ambition alone.

I have a question on the back of that. We heard that the Government thought that the cost of drawing up the plans would be negligible for public bodies and health bodies, but the delivery of the plans to achieve the outcomes is a different thing. Potentially, there is a higher cost if we procure locally; there is a higher cost to building the processing network for the food to be used locally. We have seen local authority budgets slashed over the past few years, so local authorities are under immense pressure at the moment. We hear also about the benefits of eating healthier food and the cost savings that that could have of millions of pounds to the health service every year. How much commitment should the Government give to local authorities to deliver these plans to achieve what we all want as a good food nation?

That is a discussion that we need to explore if we are to match the aspirations of the bill. What has been considered in discussions so far is that clearly the capacity to deliver the aspirations of the bill needs to be greater if local authorities are to do that effectively. It is not just about consultation; it is about operation, delivery and co-ordination—the whole series of tasks and work with different partners that will be involved if we are to deliver the aspirations effectively. I am not able to quantify what is needed, but I know that it will be much more significant than what was originally envisaged. When we think about the current challenges in the food sector and food policy in Scotland and the global factors, we see that there is more impetus than ever before to have sufficient capacity for this. This will need to be explored further with local authorities in order to quantify what is required. There will need to be an adequate and sufficient staff resource for co-ordination in local authorities via their community planning partnerships.

I agree with what Mike Callaghan said. We know that this comes at a cost and we need to think differently about how we speak about food and what the aspirations are. All too often, we think of food as being a cost to be borne or a cost to be cut and we need to reframe that into thinking about this as an investment in the wider strategies that we have touched on and the wider aspirations that are outlined in the national outcomes. How we measure that is a challenge as well—how we make sure that we are getting a good bang for our buck through this process. That has to form part of the discussions as well.

What we look at in East Ayrshire is the value on the plate. We have to look at it in more detail—that is for sure. We have learned to live with the additional costs that are involved in using local suppliers, so we have grown with that over time, but it would not be straightforward for any other local authority that had not started on this path. We have embedded it into what we do now, but it would need a lot more detailed discussion.

Thank you. That is helpful.

I would like to hear your views on whether the statutory requirement on public bodies to produce, consult on and publish a good food nation plan will make a difference to what public bodies are already doing.

I think that this provides us with an opportunity to be more strategic in our thinking about food and how we can enhance work that is already under way. I have already said that food policy is quite fragmented at local and national level, with so many statutory requirements and regulatory measures already in place. The requirement to produce and publish a plan gives us an opportunity to think better about how we draw together all those various policy areas to change our food systems and our food culture for good. I liked Robin Gourlay’s suggestion at the committee a couple of weeks ago that food plans should be given the same level of importance as other plans, such as those on health and safety. If all council and national services had to be more mindful and supportive of food in decision making, that could mean that a food plan could be transformational.

When it comes to consultation, we need to consider our people and our workforce before publishing a plan. We need to consider how we better value caterers who work so hard in our schools, hospitals and care homes, delivering hundreds and thousands of meals each day. I would like to be talking about how that plan can recognise their role and how we can make this work happen not by chance but through our people, and that includes our staff, our producers and our suppliers. We need to think carefully about that at a time when recruitment is very challenging.

We also need to be thinking about our children and young people and the important role that they have to play in developing our ambitions and our plans. This is generational change, so those are the people who we will rely on to do the work. They also have a role in monitoring and evaluating what we do.

11:15  

However, ultimately, the consultation can be done in different ways to meet the differing needs of various groups, including hard-to-reach groups. We want meaningful participation. There has been a lot of learning from the pandemic about how we do this. We should build on that and some of it has to be done nationally, perhaps through citizen panels and listening groups but locally, with the work that we have already in place with community groups and the third sector, we are very well placed to carry out engagement work across communities as well as across our children and young people networks and with our workforce.

It is exactly as Jayne Jones said—what is key is that it is about making sure that we have those links embedded, no matter what we do locally or nationally. We are in a good position because we know that people were cooking more at home during the pandemic. It became apparent that they were cooking more at home and using local. Where the local authority had links within the local communities—with community councils or associations—it allowed us to move forward very quickly at the beginning of the pandemic. That is crucial to engagement, whether it is links within the community or links with local restaurateurs and suppliers. It is about how we can join that up in a better way.

Mike, I appreciate that your time is limited, so we will bring you in on these questions. Also, if there is anything else you want to add before you go, please feel free to raise it now.

Jayne Jones made a good point about food policy being fragmented. I think that there—[Inaudible.]—and local authorities are well placed to do that at a local level. Other public bodies, such as prisons and universities and colleges, can contribute to this by drawing up their food plans along with local authorities, which will help us to respond strategically and have a strategic approach to food in managing staff welfare facilities, food waste and so on. All public organisations should have food plans in place to feed into a good food plan for the local authority community planning partnership area.

The bill provides for public authorities to be designated as specified public authorities that would be required to produce the good food nation plans. Beyond local authorities and health boards, which public bodies should be given that designation?

Following from what I said just previously, I think that there is an opportunity to share a duty of responsibility to draw up food plans with other public sector organisations. Universities and colleges and prisons are all involved in providing food for inmates in prisons and students at colleges and universities, and local authorities provide food for schoolchildren and for people in care in the care sector. Yes, I think that that would be a positive move.

Section 8 states that a relevant authority must consult on a draft plan and “have regard” to any responses. I would like to hear your ideas on how public bodies could ensure meaningful participation in the creation of their plan, especially from food workers—Jayne Jones touched on that—and those with lived experience of food-related issues. I would also appreciate hearing your views on whether it would help to have an independent oversight body set up before the plans are drafted to support public bodies to conduct the process of meaningful participation and engagement.

I touched on that briefly in my previous response. I think that there will be a need to consult in different ways, particularly if we are looking at a national plan and a variety of local plans. There is a risk that, if consultation is not done in a collaborative and cohesive way, different organisations and public bodies will be asking similar questions, but perhaps at different times, of the same community groups. Co-ordinating activities will be important because, if we are going to specific communities and groups, we need to have our questions specifically around not just what our local plans look like but also what our national plan needs to deliver.

There is learning from the pandemic about how we can do this. We should be building on some of the work that was done locally and nationally to gather views about what the response looked like post-pandemic. Our local authorities are best placed to carry out a lot of that engagement work through the community planning partnerships, so that we are not doing it in isolation. It is about that wider engagement. We need to be thinking critically about how we engage with our children and young people to take them on this journey with us, because they are a critical part of this. All the people working in food have to have a say and their voices must be listened to, because they are the ones who will come up with creative solutions and innovative ways through which we can create the systemic change that we are looking for here.

For me, it is about local authorities, community planning partnerships, community groups, the third sector and business working together to inform and design what the consultation process looks like. When you say it like that, you can see why there could be benefits to having some joined-up and collaborative approaches.

To expand the question, I call Alasdair Allan.

I want to address my question to Mark Hunter in that case. What is your understanding of the requirement to “have regard”? I know that there is a legal meaning, but what can local authorities do to gear up for the bill?

It is about engagement. Jayne Jones mentioned that the local authorities are best placed to lead, but it is also about having connections. For instance, Ayrshire food and drink has connections outwith the local authority and the public sector bodies and can say, “Okay, this is what we are trying to do to start to have a good food nation”. Bringing together the knowledge from within the local areas is crucial. Some of us have already been on that journey, and that engagement leads to other connections that allow information to be disseminated throughout the local communities and elsewhere.

Some of the questioning in this session has been about the potential cost of the bill to local authorities and other agencies. What is the potential for spending to save, if you like, given that there is a health benefit here that may impact the work of local authorities?

We will bring in Mike Callaghan if he is still with us.

I was just about to leave, but I just caught the end of that question about health benefits for local authorities. Collaboration on implementation is key for the good food nation. On health benefits, to address what Karen Adam referred to earlier regarding social and health inequalities across the country, there is a need for local authorities and their partners to have local flexibility to meet local circumstances. That would be a key benefit of good food nation plans locally, in line with the national high-level outcomes that are identified. Collaboration is the key.

I have some final comments, if I may provide them before I am required to go, convener. Do not believe that a new body is required to oversee the implementation. Local authorities are subject to local democratic accountability and also subject to regional policies and legislation from oversight bodies that they have to demonstrate compliance with. Those are some final thoughts that I would like to contribute to this discussion before I depart.

I thank you for the opportunity to contribute to the discussion. I will follow up with a fuller answer to your question, Dr Allan, and with any other comments that we would wish to provide to this discussion. Thank you very much for this morning.

Thank you very much for your contribution, Mike. I appreciate you taking the time.

We will explore that topic a little bit further and move to Jenni Minto to ask more about collaboration.

As Mike Callaghan has just said, collaboration is key. I would also reflect that one size does not fit all. Our local authorities all have responsibilities over different types of area. For example, last week we heard from Jill Muirie of Glasgow and she talked about the fact that more than 90 per cent of food that is bought in Glasgow is being transported there; it is not grown there. She mentioned partnering with other areas and other local authorities. I am interested to know from you, as two of the leading authorities in the collaboration around improving food and localness in your areas, what collaboration you have done with other local authorities.

The contracts that we wrote for local procurement were done as a pan-Ayrshire agreement and any of the Ayrshire local authorities can come into them. There is a framework of contracts, so they can choose to use any of the contracts under the framework or they can choose not to use them, but it is a collaboration. We share information and the procurement process with our colleagues elsewhere in Ayrshire, though not necessarily outside. Again, however, that does not stop it opening up further to areas such as Renfrewshire—it is just that we have not had that discussion yet. We write pan-Ayrshire contracts and they are asked if they want to come into the contract process, which they do.

Collaboration is so critical to what we do around public sector food. There is no doubt about it. Mark Hunter has talked about some of the work that is under way across local authorities. Within Argyll and Bute we may not be working across local authority boundaries, partly because our size and geography makes that challenging. However, we work with our health boards and our health and social care partnership. I have a local care home producing meals for early years settings. I have a local hospital producing meals for early years settings and also for a care home. It is about how we can think differently about good food and making the best use of public investment in public sector food, and that can be place based as well as thinking about it sectorally around school food and hospitals and care homes. We should be embracing how we can share good food in collaboration with other organisations rather than having separate plans that may not cross over.

On school food, we are considered to be leading the way nationally on successful collaborative working. We see a lot of partnership working between local authority caterers through organisations such as Assist FM and the Association for Public Service Excellence, and we collaborate with Scottish Government civil servants, Education Scotland, Food Standards Scotland, our supply chain, trade unions and the various food and drink stakeholder groups that we regularly engage with. We begin to see successful models of how the sharing of best practice already exists, but we tend to keep that under the radar and do it without shouting about it. The plans will enable us to be clearer about some of the good work that we have under way, and that is before I even talk to the work that we do with our children and young people to improve school food or with our communities on community food.

11:30  

Should specified functions that relate to food policy areas and that are being driven by the Scottish Government be co-ordinated via primary legislation? We have talked about things such as procurement, supply chains, green spaces, allotments, food education, fair work and other important strategic goals in our aim of creating a healthy and sustainable Scotland, including meeting the net zero targets. Should that be put on a legislative footing and given teeth, or should they be dealt with by secondary legislation?

I honestly do not have a view on whether that should be done in primary or secondary legislation. I think that Mike Callaghan would have been best placed to give a view on that. However, what that looks like needs to be developed between local and national government. We need to be clear about that. The definition of the specified functions has to be as broad as possible so that we include all the delivery areas in the bill, and that leads right up to how we deliver the national outcomes.

From a local authority perspective, it should include all areas of business within which a local authority is engaged. For whole-system improvement, we need to have regard to all the functions in the system, including education, planning, housing, waste, economic development, procurement, transport, social care and community wealth building. How we define that and where it should sit in the legal framework needs further discussion with local government.

Mark, do you have any views on that?

My view is similar to Jayne Jones’s. There has to be that connection between all the departments in local authorities. I do not have a view on whether it should be done through primary or secondary legislation, but those specified areas could be quite extensive and cover the majority of things that we would need to look at in the bill.

To expand on that, how much engagement do you expect to have on that specific question? You want to flesh it out. What expectations do you have of your engagement?

On engagement, as we said, all local authorities are on different parts of the pathway. I was employed about four or five years ago to look at food in East Ayrshire, but also at engagement between education and other departments. We are lucky, because that allowed me to do what I needed to do. I appreciate that some catering organisations involved with a local authority might not be able to do that engagement, but we did it and had a good response from the education department, the health and social care partnership and private sector bodies. That allowed me to get ahead. It allowed us to put in a path and engage quickly to respond to the pandemic. If we had not had that engagement, we probably would have been a bit more behind in trying to support the things that we had to do during the pandemic.

Engagement is crucial to moving forward. It is for other areas to recognise that, if the bill is put in place, they would be obliged to speak to us—perhaps I would not say obliged, but at least if we contacted them they would give us time to speak to them about how we can move forward.

Do you have a view on what role the Scottish Parliament has in scrutiny of the bill?

It is for public authorities to develop and implement the operational delivery. Obviously, we have our own scrutiny and oversight through local elected members. However, it is entirely appropriate for the Scottish Parliament to scrutinise the progress on the outcomes in the delivery plans and how the specified functions are meeting them, so that we can see and understand how well the process is performing. There has to be a level of assurance that what has been committed to is being delivered, and scrutiny forms an important part of that to make sure that it is the case.

A couple of weeks ago, Jayne Jones and I participated in the cross-party group on food, which was excellent. My colleague Jim Fairlie was there as well.

Do you have any views on the unintended consequences of a target-led approach? We have discussed that already. There was mention at the CPG that meeting targets could actually put a burden on food producers and increase prices. George Burgess said that cost should not be the only measure. How do we bring all that together, given the pressures on budgets?

That is one of the significant challenges that we have to consider. I said earlier that targets can be useful and that there is a place for them in making sure we are going in the right direction, but it is more about having clear outcomes and indicators that give us the framework to work within. That also gives us flexibility to be able to deliver things appropriately and locally and to enable collaboration.

If we have too many targets and they are too rigorous, that can be a barrier to safe implementation, including a cost barrier. Say, for example, that we set a 60 per cent target for Scottish food in local authority purchasing. For some local authorities, that might be a small increase that they will be able to achieve without significant cost but, for others, it might be a huge leap from where they are. We need to ensure that the targets are meaningful for everyone and that they move us forward rather than overwhelming some people with targets that are either unattainable or not reasonable.

You make a good point there. It depends on how puritanical we get over procurement. For example, something could be imported into the country and then rebadged or reprocessed and a Scottish label put on it, and then designated as sourced in Scotland. If we change that through the bill, that could drive costs substantially. I am really just commenting on the back of what you said.

We should be conscious of that. That sort of badging can sustain employment opportunities through distribution and logistics. Although it may not be a Scottish product, it could be a product that is supporting Scottish employment.

We have touched on the role of Parliament in scrutiny. Jayne Jones commented that local authorities have a process through which elected members will, no doubt, be expected to approve good food nation plans when they are eventually developed. Given that much of the content of the good food nation plan will be in secondary legislation, which allows for very little scrutiny, should the Scottish Government’s plan come to the Scottish Parliament for approval and further scrutiny before local authorities are expected to pay regard to it?

I am not in a position to give a good answer to that. I would like to consider it further and give you a response later, if that is all right.

Absolutely.

Mark, do you have any thoughts on whether the Scottish Government’s plan should come before Parliament before it comes into force?

I would tend to say yes, in my opinion.

I would like to bring up an issue that we have not touched on—I do not know whether there will be questions on it. We have talked about costs. We know that people in rural areas, where costs are higher, eat more healthily—that is a fact. Also, we can control what happens in a local authority, but we do not control what happens outside the school gate, for instance, and in other sectors. I would like the plan to come to the Scottish Parliament first and then to the local authorities.

That is useful.

I want to go back to what Rachael Hamilton talked about, and the aspiration. I remember from my early years of involvement in the issue that public procurement used to be about pence per unit. Now, it is about value for every pound that is spent, as opposed to being based on the price. What we are trying to do is a big thing. It is a cultural shift, and I am pretty sure that at the moment the bill has provisions for a review after two years. Given the number of local authorities across the country and the diversity in where they are starting from, is two years long enough for us to be able to start on the road, get it implemented, look at the situation and see what changes we need to make to take things further?

There is a risk that, if the reporting frequency is too tight, it becomes a burden. That is a bit like with targets, when you spend all your time reporting rather than doing the work. Of course, it is perfectly reasonable to expect public authorities to report on their progress and to be held accountable for implementing the actions that they commit to in their plans, but it will take time to bed in and get the resource available—should it be funded—for the work that is needed to move the plans forward. It depends on what some of that looks like but, to deliver change, we need to report on progress.

It will be a long-term commitment that will be at least generational, and monitoring progress every two years is an appropriate starting point. However, there should be reasonable flexibility and understanding that, after the initial two years, we may only see small incremental moves forward even if we are heading in the right direction.

That emphasises the point that I was trying to make, which is that some local authorities might be starting from a very low base and then we will have authorities such as East Ayrshire that are starting from a very high base. We cannot start the process for every local authority at the same point.

Absolutely.

Mark, do you have views on that?

We do not want to underestimate some of the work that is probably happening in every local authority but just has not been documented or shown. They will aim to start off on the bill when they are good and ready. As we said, we are on different paths and at different levels but, within the two years, we have to show some sort of progress from where we have started. As I said, a lot of local authorities are probably doing something along the lines of the measures in the bill, but it might just not have been documented.

You raise the important point that the bill brings to the surface some of the fantastic work that is being done but is not documented, so people do not know about it. In effect, creating the plan will let us see where we are. There is a lot of conversation about how bad public procurement is in local authorities, but we might be doing a hell of a lot more than we realise, and the plans will bring that to the surface.

I agree.

That is useful. We move on to talk about the right to food.

I am interested in the right to food. I have a couple of questions that I will roll into one. I would like to hear the panel’s views on whether the right to food should be incorporated through the bill. If you feel it should be, how could that be achieved? Secondly, if there was a statutory right to food, what implications would that have for the work of public authorities and their good food nation plans?

11:45  

We cannot talk about any actions to create systemic change without thinking about our most vulnerable households and those who have either insufficient income to meet their food needs or who are food insecure by virtue of where they live or their personal circumstances, whatever they may be. There are significant disparities in how we think about food insecurity. If we do not ensure that there is some crossover of policy around the right to food and the bill, we are not thinking about that wider systemic change. For me, that does not necessarily mean that a right to food should not be firmly within a different legislative framework. However, it absolutely has to be strengthened as part of the bill.

There would be very significant implications for public sector food. We have learned many lessons about different needs and responses, particularly as we have emerged from the pandemic and more people are struggling to cope with the cost of living and rising food, fuel and energy costs.

How we implement a right to food and require local authorities to support households will mean different things. First, we have the issue of those who just cannot afford good food due to lack of income. Local authorities, working with national Government, have an important role in supporting households that are financially insecure. There are also people who face food insecurity as a result of scarcity, because they live in rural and remote areas that are adversely affected by supply chain issues. In some cases, they are at the end of very long supply chains.

The public sector is coping with food shortages, too, at the moment. Some of us regularly have to cope with transport issues due to driver shortages, road closures and ferry cancellations. For people in those circumstances, the issue may not be due to lack of income but lack of access, and local and national support is required to try to overcome some of those issues and challenges.

Similarly, we have people in our communities who are dealing with food insecurity due to their inability to travel to get food. Due to illness or age, some people may struggle to cook. Others may have lost interest in food due to loneliness and social isolation. Tilly Robinson-Miles gave evidence on that at an earlier meeting.

For local authorities and communities—[Inaudible.]

—developing plans for all those types of responses ranging from lunch clubs and meals on wheels to tackling transportation issues. All those things need to be addressed. The right to food would ensure that that happens. We need to think about how that fits with the bill. Some of it is about partnership and how the local and national plans talk to one another. It is about using them as drivers to create dignified and sustained strategies that support people who are dealing with food insecurity, no matter what the reason for it.

I agree with everything that Jayne Jones has said. The bill should work in parallel with anything that is produced on the right to food. We know that access to food can be an issue for some people. We see a difference between people on low incomes and benefits and those who are only on a lower income and not entitled to benefits. Access to food needs to be looked at and addressed. In addition to working with local authorities, that can be as simple as having a community larder in some cases. It is about allowing that engagement to take place. I see the right to food and the bill working in parallel rather than the right being incorporated in the bill.

I will pick up on the theme of oversight and accountability. A number of respondents to the call for views raised concerns that the reporting and review requirements in sections 11 and 12 of the bill do not ensure adequate accountability of public bodies. What are the panel’s views on the appropriateness of the reporting and review requirements?

We touched earlier on the reporting mechanism, the frequency of reporting and what reporting can look like. It is perfectly reasonable to expect us to report on progress, and that has to be done at appropriate junctures to make sure that we are able to monitor progress. We have also touched on the importance of scrutiny, both locally and nationally. Those are things that we are very mindful of before we start this journey. It is something that we are used to coping with, because food is not something—[Inaudible.]—exposure before, and we are not currently measured through targets in the local government benchmarking framework or anything like that. We are looking to introduce a new system, which will create the monitoring and scrutiny process that does not currently exist.

My view is that that should be light touch and it should be appropriate at local and national levels. I am sure that we will go on to discuss whether there is a requirement for a national body to provide some of that assurance. For me, it is important that we have those discussions so that we know what can support us to develop actions for change rather than policing actions. For me, it is about how we can be flexible and dynamic enough to allow the work on the ground to take place without it being curtailed.

I have nothing to add to that.

That is okay. I will go on to my next question.

Many stakeholders have called for an oversight body—which Jayne Jones touched on—to be tasked with benchmarking, providing expertise in food policy, ensuring policy coherence, publishing annual progress reports on the state of the whole food system, facilitating public participation and more. If those responsibilities were given to an existing body such as Food Standards Scotland, how would you see that body expanding and evolving in order to fulfil those many important new functions alongside its current remit?

If we are looking at creating a national body, that comes at a cost, as we know, and we have spoken quite a lot today about where that cost should be appropriately allocated to give us the best delivery on the ground. We need to think carefully about that. That is not to say that a national oversight body is not the right thing to invest in. However, there is a requirement for national oversight and for there to be assurances that local and national plans and policies are in line, are delivering and are complying, and that the required consultation is being carried out, and those are all things that local authorities do anyway.

To achieve a systemic approach we need to make sure that there is cohesion, and central oversight is an essential part of that. I can see the value in having something akin to the Poverty and Inequality Commission overseeing the work. That is just an example. If there were to be additional duties for an existing body to carry out the oversight, I could equally see the value of that, provided that it was not just seen as a bolt-on to existing roles and responsibilities. There is a dichotomy: should we be creating something new, where we can clearly define what role we are looking for, or is the duty something we are looking to add on to an existing body, in which case we might not have the same scope and ability to be clear around what the intentions are?

I would be very keen for oversight to be undertaken by one particular body rather than the add-on to Food Standards Scotland that Jayne Jones discussed. That is all I have to say about that. The oversight would have to be detailed enough that areas that you would like to focus on are focused on and focused on by everybody—not just the public sector, but the private sector too. Local authorities could be allowed to have that engagement with the private sector, obviously with somebody else overseeing the whole process.

I am going to throw a wee curveball to you both. Should the scrutiny be through the ballot box? We have local authority elections coming up in May and we have national elections every five years. Should the performance of the people who are delivering and developing these plans ultimately be decided by the people who will be the end users, which is the public?

We need to be clear in our heads about two different aspects of the issue. The first is the scrutiny element, which is where the political aspect that you refer to comes in. However, a lot of the work will be operational. It will be about officers in local authorities and the national health service working in partnership with communities and groups on the ground, and those are the parts that we need to make sure are being measured and dealt with appropriately.

We need to provide the political oversight to make sure that the work is being seen through on its natural journey to achieve the systemic change that we are looking for. However, ultimately, we are talking about operational delivery on the ground, and what that looks like. We need to make sure that that part of it also has oversight, so that we are assured that the work is delivering.

I have a little supplementary on that. George Burgess suggested that the electoral cycle would ensure that elected members would be held to account. That is not the case with health boards and I think that there is an issue there. It is difficult to hold health boards to account to ensure that their plans are right.

I go back to scrutiny. You suggested that we perhaps did not need a new body. Are you suggesting that local authorities could have an obligation to consult with other bodies? For example, on inequalities, you would go to a body, which could be Food Standards Scotland, to scrutinise how your plan addressed inequality? Does there need to be a requirement for local authorities to do that? Do all the bodies need to play a role?

Jayne Jones, I would like you to answer that question. It was something that you touched on.

It comes back to one of my earlier points about food policy being quite fragmented and responsibility for different areas around food, food policy and statutory compliance lying not just within different stakeholder groups and different regulatory bodies but within different directorates of Scottish Government and different directorates within local government. Having the national plan gives us the opportunity to draw some of that together, be more holistic and systems focused, and have that cohesive approach. That is why I think that there is benefit in having national oversight. Determining what that looks like still needs some work. I think it should be light touch but I was suggesting that the organisation that provides the oversight could look like something akin to the Poverty and Inequality Commission.

I have two or three questions for Jayne Jones. You have indicated, I think—I do not want to put words in your mouth—a wariness about local authorities spending too much time on reporting on their activities in connection with the plans. Does that also indicate a wariness about targets?

What I have been trying to make clear is that if we ask for too much by way of complying with targets and reporting mechanisms, there is a risk that we can spend too much time focusing on those aspects and not enough time on delivering the systemic changes we want to see.

The work on school food that Mark Hunter and I have talked about and described over years has been absolutely the right thing to do and is following the right trajectory to create that systemic change, not because there has been a requirement to report on it or because there has been a requirement to meet a target. Those are both very useful and important things, but we can get tied up in those being the be all and end all of the plans.

Again, if I have picked this up right, you seem to be quite open minded about whether there should be a new body for oversight. We have had evidence put to us that the food world is a very cluttered environment just now. Is that a picture that you recognise?

I would say that that is the case, as there is a fragmented approach. We go to different people for different things and regulation takes place in different ways. For instance, in the work that Mark Hunter and I are doing, we have Food Standards Scotland to deal with food safety, Education Scotland is helping to support and ensure compliance with school food standards, and the Care Commission is involved in monitoring compliance in early years meals. There is quite a lot of regulation and different requirements at the moment.

Introducing another body could do one of two things. It could create yet another body to have to report to, or it could simplify some of that, which is what I would prefer to see.

Finally, on another issue, the bill, or rather the national plan associated with this bill, will make real some of the rights that will be contained in other legislation, such as the right to food in the human rights bill. How important is it that rights around food are connected with other rights? I ask that in the context of the discussion that we have had in other parts of the meeting about the competing problems that families have around eating and heating. How important is it that these things are all connected?

12:00  

In the committee’s earlier discussion, we heard quite a lot about how, for many households, the reason why they find themselves in food insecurity is a lack of income.

As carers and people who feed people—I have been caring all my life—we understand that food is the ultimate source of anybody’s wellbeing. These things are connected, and we look at that through the food education programmes by asking what leads people to make last-resort decisions about food. We know that the decision can be between having enough heating in the house, having enough fuel to cook the food or having the food to cook on the fuel that you do have. There is a clear link between those things.

On the connections that we make between financial inclusion, health and social care partnerships, dieticians and the NHS, the important thing is that we see the links and that sort of joined-up thinking down here. It is about referring people to the right people at the right time.

Food always comes down to the bottom line. If somebody does not know how to cook food, they will go for the easier option. They will go for the toast and the jam if they do not have anything else—we know that. It is really about the linking and the joined-up approach that we keep talking about. Where that is good it works really well, and where organisations are still on that path, there can be a difficulty in joining up with other organisations, the third sector and the NHS, as I said before. That is how I see it.

I have a yes or no question to finish, based on some of the last few questions that Alasdair Allan teased out, and it is on education. Should primary legislation state that there needs to be due regard for or recognition of the importance of education in regard to healthy eating and making the right choices?

Yes.

Yes.

Excellent. We have come to the end of our session. Thank you very much. We were very hard on you. You were reduced to two in the end but, a bit like healthy eating, it is about not quantity, but quality. Certainly, your answers were of very high quality and they will help us in our deliberations. Thank you for providing evidence this morning and for the time that you have taken to do that.

12:02 Meeting continued in private until 12:47.