Meeting of the Parliament 13 September 2018
On any night of the week in the Parliament, events, receptions and cross-party groups celebrate the success of Scottish food and drink. We are dripping with opportunities to celebrate that success, but it is time that we also faced up to the areas where we are failing.
We are failing on animal welfare when we ship thousands of three-week-old calves each year on six-day journeys to the continent. We are failing nature when wild salmon stocks and farmland birds, such as the lapwing, are in rapid decline, with no firm plans to reverse those losses. We are failing to address the obesity epidemic, with 65 per cent of adults and nearly a third of children either obese or overweight. We are failing on affordability, too, with the poorest households needing to spend nearly two thirds of their income on food if they are to meet nutritional guidelines. It is time to see action on those crises to turn problems into opportunities, and the Greens, alongside all the Opposition parties, agree that a bill is the only way to achieve that.
We all understand the threat that Brexit poses to protected geographical indications and the need for continued, if not improved, protection after withdrawal—there is no disagreement there. However, today we need to move the debate on and commit to what we can achieve through wider food policy and what our aims are for future powers that may come our way.
I welcome the Scottish Government publishing, late on Tuesday evening, its good food nation progress report. At least it gives us an insight into what the Government meant when it downgraded good food nation from a bill to a programme last week. However, the report fails to give us any real update on progress. It is merely a list of ideas and intentions, along with a summary of existing schemes with a food theme. Many of those schemes—which are well intentioned—were already in place when the SNP proposed a good food nation bill before the 2016 Holyrood election. If the Government was content with them, why did it propose legislation in the first place?
The progress report gives us very little data, and makes no attempt to track progress against the indicators for a good food nation that were put together by the food commission in 2015. This report is an attempt to say, “Trust us—we have got this in hand.” I am sorry, but I am not convinced.
That is why my amendment calls for targets to be required by legislation, because we cannot report on progress if we do not know what we are trying to achieve and by when. I hope that we can all agree on the areas of policy that should be covered by those targets, because the wording of the amendment is lifted directly from the Scottish Government’s 2014 good food nation paper. I will quote it, because it has been around for some time and there has been a lot of good thinking on it. It stated:
“there is consensus on the key concept areas: health and wellbeing, environmental sustainability, local economic prosperity, resilient communities and fairness in the food chain”.
The other key benefit of legislation is that it places a clear responsibility on ministers to take forward those plans. Leadership and political will have been sadly lacking on this in recent years. We should give recognition to the former Cabinet Secretary for Rural Affairs, Food and the Environment, Richard Lochhead, for his drive and vision in the original good food nation policy in 2014. He understood the challenges in tackling the wide-ranging nature of food policy, but he was not afraid to take them on and he brought together a coalition of political and civic society support.
Since 2016, however, not only have we seen the issue of food dropped from the cabinet secretary’s title, the vision of the good food nation has been steadily eroded until what was left was largely just an industry marketing programme in last week’s programme for government.
Both the 2016 and 2017 programmes for government promised a consultation on a bill—not an approach—which never emerged. The cabinet secretary has had three reports provided to him by the food commission and, in December last year, a set of 10 recommendations for a good food nation bill. He has not published his response to those recommendations, yet he felt comfortable with disbanding the food commission and relieving it of its duties at the start of the summer, a move which he failed to inform Parliament of.
The Government should consult on a bill now, not just on an approach, as the minister announced in this debate. So much excellent work to prepare the ground has been done, and not just by the food commission. The Scottish food coalition has brought the public and the food and farming sectors together to develop innovative ideas to feed into the bill. We are ready to go on this now. We have the ideas and the understanding.
In June this year, at the final meeting of the food commission, the minutes state that the cabinet secretary told the commission that
“a silo problem still existed across Scotland and that this made some legislative options difficult to achieve in a minority government”.
The amendments from all four Opposition parties today show that we are more than on board with this cross-silo legislation. The sticking point is not parliamentary support, but political will from the cabinet secretary himself. He needs to get out of his economic silo, get moving and draft this bill or make way for someone who will.
I move amendment S5M-13876.3, to insert after “parliamentary session;”:
“agrees that this legislation should be broad-reaching and include measurable and time-bound targets for areas of policy on which food impacts, including health and wellbeing, environmental sustainability, local economic prosperity, resilient communities and fairness in the food chain, as well as new powers that the devolved institutions might receive as a result of exiting the EU, such as animal welfare, food standards, and public procurement;”.
15:09Motions, questions or amendments mentioned by their reference code.