Tim Lang

Noble Lords, multiple reports in recent years have warned that the UK is dangerously unprepared for potentially catastrophic shocks to our food system.

Professor Tim Lang's impressive report for the National Preparedness Commission last year paints a comprehensive picture of current vulnerabilities.

The National Audit Office warned last month that the sector's ability to withstand events has not been tested.

Farmers tell us that climate change is already a reality, creating huge unpredictability.

Certainly in Britain now, you know, a real lack of any food policy, you know.

So I think that Professor Tim Lang, the Professor of Food Policy, you know, he kind of says that the problem in my job is that the government has no food policy.

You know, we sort of...

We just have this sense that we're a rich country and we can buy whatever we want on global markets.

We'll hear more about future crops shortly.

But first, if we're imagining what we might be growing in 2101, will we have enough food and where will it come from? Tim Lang is Emeritus Professor of Food Policy at City St George's, University of London.

I think one of the fundamental problems of Britain for the last 170 years has been that the British ruling elite lost interest in food.

And it came back and hit us with a vengeance in World War I and World War II.

So if we have farming prepared to change and the food industry prepared to change, then the people, I think, and their creativity might actually win out.

We might have a consumer and public-led food culture.

Professor Tim Lang.

Well, I'm down here at the John Innes Centre in Norwich.

And, and one of the first things I said to the audience was that, you know, if we had five people in a room, there would be at least seven different definitions of what exactly we're talking about with this.

And the way that we defined it was we were talking about food system emergency preparedness, which is, you know, something that Tim Lang has championed for a long time, I think what a lot of people would understand as food security.

But the key focus for us was that our just-in-time foods, uh, food system is inherently fragile, that it's centralized, import dependent and data reliant, that we've lost most of our place-based economies and regional processing facilities.

And that when you add all this together, it makes the UK a more attractive target for rogue states, rogue actors.

Would you generally accept that framing?

I completely accept it.

Actually, Tim Lang and I together gave evidence to the House of Lords Resilience Committee in a report that is due to be published in, in November.

And what is different between England and the devolved nations, and it's why I recommended establishing Food and Drink England, is that we don't know our supply chains.

Over one hundred and fifty leading academics, food security experts, and civil society groups have issued an open letter accusing the British government of being complacent about food as a national security matter, warning that the country lacks a comprehensive plan to feed its population during a severe national crisis.

The warning, coordinated by food advocacy charity Food Rise and prominent public health experts, including Professor Tim Lang, urges Prime Minister Keir Starmer's administration to overhaul the UK's food infrastructure to withstand compounding geopolitical conflicts, extreme climate events, energy disruptions, and potential cyberattacks.

In their submission to Downing Street, signatories highlighted that Britain's heavy reliance on just-in-time supply chains and commercial imports leaves the domestic food system acutely vulnerable to external shocks.

Experts noted that state-managed strategic food reserves were largely dismantled in the nineteen-nineties, leaving the UK without significant emergency stockpiles in the event of major trade route blockades or prolonged infrastructure outages.