Britain’s food supply system runs on just-in-time delivery and holds almost no stock anywhere along the chain. More than 150 experts have now told Andy Burnham, in an open letter, that the country has no plan for feeding the population in a crisis.
The signatories, including academics, business leaders, community groups and food partnerships, argue the government is “complacent about food as a national security matter” and want ministers to treat food security as a core resilience question. Their central operational claim: the delivery model built over recent decades “is not fit for today’s or tomorrow’s challenges”. With little stock held along the supply chain and no national food storage, the system has no buffer if flows are disrupted. The strategic food stockpile that had existed since the second world war was wound up by ministers in the 1990s, stripping away that layer of protection.
The threats the letter identifies are varied and, its authors argue, growing. Geopolitical shocks, the climate crisis, cyber-attacks, ransomware, software malfunction, energy outages and disinformation all expose a food chain operating with minimal slack. In an era when food supplies “can be weaponised”, the absence of storage capacity and redundancy is a structural weakness, not a theoretical one.
What happens when those shocks land? The letter describes a system that is highly wasteful, import-dependent and environmentally unsustainable, driven by the pursuit of private profit rather than resilience, with millions of people unable to afford a decent, healthy diet.
To close the gap between a fragile operating model and the risks it faces, the letter sets out a concrete delivery agenda. It calls for local food resilience committees established under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, an audit of the UK’s reliance on a small number of very large food companies and on food imports, a realignment of national food production around nutritional needs, the creation of national, regional, local and community food storage schemes, and support for decentralising the UK’s food supply.
The warning lands weeks after the National Audit Office, the public spending watchdog, rebuked ministers for failing to do enough to help households and businesses plan for possible emergencies. The government’s own research shows Britons are less prepared for potential catastrophic events than citizens of several other European countries, while the UK is more reliant on food imports than some of its neighbours. The delivery system is exposed on both the preparedness and the supply side.
Some movement is visible at ministerial level. The environment secretary, Angela Eagle, has recently recommended that UK households build up stores of enough food and water to survive a few days without power or water, amid warnings that the El Niño weather phenomenon could bring a wet, stormy winter to the UK. The Cabinet Office is to launch a campaign telling households to stock up on tinned foods alongside preparations for future emergencies, and the government’s Prepare website outlines steps people should take, including assembling items at home such as tinned meat, fruit or vegetables that do not need cooking.
The signatories, however, argue the operational detail is missing. They claim the government is not paying enough attention to what such a household store should actually look like, and is failing to consider that many lower-income households may not be able to afford to build up a stockpile in the first place, shifting the burden of resilience onto those least able to carry it.
Prof Tim Lang of the Centre for Food Policy at City St George’s, University of London, one of the signatories, framed the problem as one of system design rather than individual effort. “We need a system shift: grow more food; more regionalism, diversity and storage at multiple levels, not just households; and public engagement in civil food defence,” he said. “Central government must provide more strategic leadership while encouraging actions at different levels. Communities and households cannot resolve faultlines in the UK’s food system.”
Prof Paul Behrens of the Oxford Martin School at the University of Oxford, who also signed, argued that resilience and sustainability point the same way operationally: “Food resilience, healthy diet and environmental benefits all point in the same direction: grow more of the vegetables, fruit and pulses people actually need, closer to home.”
Eagle has said she would oversee farming improvements and a reservoir-building programme that should help Britain face extreme weather. Those measures address production capacity, but the storage and distribution questions at the heart of the letter’s warning remain unanswered.