Recommendations

Governance

• Include a food strategy within climate and nature plans, building on the actions highlighted in this report.
• Establish or support an existing cross-sectoral local food partnership.
• Seek dedicated funding or earmark funding for work on healthy and sustainable food.
• Assign responsibility to a food officer to sit within the public health, economic development or climate team.
• Sign up to and track actions on the Every Mouthful Counts toolkit.

Planning

• Join Planning for the Planet to ensure you are supporting a sustainable food system through planning policy. This includes measures to scrutinise intensive livestock applications thoroughly and supporting food growing and sustainable farming.
• Use the development of your combined authority’s Local Nature Recovery Scheme to put in place a planning requirement that all new farms will enhance biodiversity.

Procurement

• Serve more climate-friendly meals across the council’s services, including schools, nurseries, meal delivery, canteens and care homes. This includes serving more vegetables and pulses, and a less-and-better approach to meat.
• Publish timebound and measurable targets for procurement that supports local food businesses and those with ethical and environmental credentials.
• Develop good food standards for events, festivals and vendors on council land
• Engage with local food suppliers to understand how much food demand they can meet and support them in winning local procurement contracts.
• Engage with suppliers on adopting waste and emissions reduction targets.
• Use communications to deliver public campaigns that encourage climate-friendly diets.
• Promote local food businesses and sustainable food to the public.

Farming and food growing

• Publish timebound and measurable targets for Farming and Food Growing, including:
  • Protecting and increasing land for community food growing.
  • Improving access to allotments and community growing opportunities.
• Publish a map of council landholdings.
• Look for opportunities for new farm enterprises, including on peri-urban land.
• Promote training materials for agroecological farming and organise workshops to support local farmers to implement it.
• Support networking and coordination for groups of farmers to work together and share knowledge on agroecological farming, equipment and purchasing power, as well as to seek funding.
• Incorporate climate and nature requirements within tenancy agreements on council-owned farmland.
• Develop demonstration farms that use agroecological farming techniques.
• Invest in local food infrastructure and support for buying collectives and shared infrastructure, to shorten supply chains and support agroecological farmers and producers.

Food waste

• Publish timebound and measurable targets for reducing food waste and directing unavoidable waste to useful purposes.
• Distribute free food waste caddies and compost bins
• Run food waste awareness campaigns and events.
• Provide a food waste collection service for households, schools and businesses.
• Reduce food waste in council-controlled settings, by using better purchasing, portion control and presentation.
• Ensure there are routes for edible surplus food to be collected and redistributed.

Public communication and engagement

• Encourage climate-friendly diets through council public health messaging
• Adopt a Healthy Food Advertising Policy