Rural Affairs and Islands Committee 03 September 2025
Your question points to a really interesting topic. Local authorities form a heterogeneous group because they range from very urban to very rural, so we will see quite distinct plans.
There is a tremendous opportunity to see partnerships developing in the more rural local authorities because those are quite underdeveloped at the moment. For example, NFUS is engaging with councils, but I know from speaking with the NFUS team that that has been quite modest in the past and that the opportunity for engagement has not really been taken up. That will change because of the project for food system transformation and because the long-term idea that sits within the act is valuable and rare.
Resources are tight. Government is often criticised for its lack of long-term thinking, but this is not a three-year project or even one for the life of a Parliament. It is long term, with a cycle of five years that repeats and repeats. I expect that, as we work through the first two, three or four of those cycles, we will see far more interaction between local authorities and food producers, including farmers and market gardeners, as they seek to build local food economies in a way that we have not seen to date. There is that potential.
As those discussions develop, one by-product of that process will be that we will see progress on some of the assumed tensions that we spoke about earlier. We will find out how real those are and how we can begin dissipating them. There is a real opportunity for new ways of working, particularly between rural local authorities and food producers.