Each year the government spends £1 billion on food for the public sector - including in schools (£320m per year), hospitals (£300m per year), care homes and the armed forces (£195m per year).
The Good Food for Our Money campaign is calling on government to introduce mandatory health, animal welfare, ethical and environmental standards for this food so that:
- public money is spent on food which solves urgent health, environmental and social problems rather than causes them in the first place
- creates a reliable market for good food
- leads by example
Food served in the public sector is not required to meet any standards. As a result, it is bad for our health, bad for the environment and bad for the best of British farmers who lose out at the expense of imports from abroad. Although there is overwhelming, and growing, evidence about the huge health and environmental damage caused by the food we eat, years of voluntary attempts by government to improve the food it buys in the public sector food have proven a costly failure.
In the previous ten years, and as a reaction to failed attempts to improve public sector food by voluntary measures, support for mandatory standards has rocketed. This includes support for mandatory standards amongst health, environmental, public sector, farming and commercial catering organisations. For a full list of those organisations that are supporting the Good Food for Our Money campaign please click here.
Registered charity (no.