Can food strategy survive Defra reshuffle?

The Defra ministerial merry-go-round has swung back into action. Steve Reed’s departure to be replaced by Emma Reynolds makes it 10 secretaries of state in the past ten years – hardly a recipe for stability and continuity of policy.

Reed may be grateful of an escape to housing (if you can call it an escape given the myriad challenges Labour faces in meeting its pledge to build 1.5 million new homes in England by 2029) having spent a torrid year struggling to defend some deeply unpopular policies, not least the inheritance tax raid on farmers.

His successor Reynolds has spent most of her political career in the Treasury, most recently as financial services minister, and has previously worked as a lobbyist for the financial sector. As is common with government reshuffles, this is not a case of putting round pegs in round holes but finding a spare seat at the cabinet table for No.10 loyalists or demoting those in higher office who have fallen out of favour.

A cursory look at some recent Defra leads – Ranil Jayawardene, Theresa Villiers, Steve Barclay and, sorry to remind you, Liz Truss – shows that demonstrable experience in matters of food, the environment and rural affairs rarely features at the top of the list of competencies. Politics almost always trumps policy when it comes to filling the Defra hotseat.

Perhaps it doesn’t matter that Reynolds is more used to dealing with financiers than farmers. Civil servants, after all, are the people that hold the wealth of institutional and policy knowledge within government departments. Still, if she is to avoid the travails of her predecessor, Reynolds will quickly need to grasp the nettle on core issues like the government’s environmental land management schemes, about which uncertainty over future funding and access has left farmers angry and frustrated.

If the unpopular Reed’s departure has a certain political logic to it, the defenestration of minister for food security and rural affairs Daniel Zeichner feels like an altogether more careless act. Zeichner, who shadowed the role before labour came to power, has been a driving force behind the development of the government’s new food strategy – the so-called ‘good food cycle’ – which deftly diagnoses the challenges facing the food system and identifies 10 priority outcomes for fixing them.

Food politics is deeply nuanced. It takes years to understand the complexities of food systems and start navigating the challenges in balancing the often competing demands of economics, livelihoods, health and the environment when developing policy.

Zeichner’s ambitious food strategy showed that he got it. Sustain, in its response to the reshuffle, described him as having “a knowledge of the policy domain that is rarely seen”. But the foundations are weak. The strategy lacks clear indicators and implementation plans for the 10 outcomes. The political impetus behind rewiring the food system could come to nought without ministerial commitment and strong advocacy around the cabinet table.

Will Zeichner’s replacement, Angela Eagle, who will now chair the food strategy advisory group, be that champion? Sustain noted how Eagle does not have a background on many of the policy issues, but she does bring “significant ministerial experience”.

The same was said of Michael Gove, who was briefly and somewhat surprisingly the poster boy for progressive thinking on sustainable food systems during his early months as Defra lead. Reporting on Gove’s seminal policy speech to the Oxford Farming Conference in 2018, I wrote that his vision of a new farm support regime that provided public money for public goods “represented the greatest shift in food and farming policy since Britain joined the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973”. 

Gove talked up a range of ambitious food policy proposals including a universal, gold-standard metric for food and farming quality to help consumers cut through the complexity of certification schemes. It was lapped up by environmental groups, yet I cautioned at the time that “nothing has yet been delivered”. Sure enough, like many before him, Gove was gone before large parts of his vision saw the light of day. Defra, once again, was merely a stepping stone (back) to higher office (in Gove’s case the position of chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, effectively the highest ranking minister in the Cabinet Office).

Such is the risk now for the food strategy. A deeply unpopular government cannot be relied upon to challenge the vested interests that achieving the priority outcomes will require. The only stability that can be relied upon comes from the diverse and committed group of stakeholders that want to make a better food system a reality. Now is the time for them to hold new ministers’ feet to the fire.

*A version of this article was first published by Footprint Media.