Rachel Reeves has delivered her first budget as Labour Chancellor. What does it mean for food and farming? Our team take a look.
Healthy School Food
On school food, the Autumn Budget committed £30 million next year to expand school breakfast clubs, with the focus on enabling parents to work. The Chancellor spoke about “tripling of investment”, which is a reference to the level of funding for the existing National School Breakfast Programme. However, it represents less than 10% of the estimate in the Labour Party manifesto for rolling out universal primary school breakfast provision and refers to the new pilot programme involving just 750 primary schools from April 2025.
There were no commitments in the Autumn Budget to increase investment in expanding school meals, reviewing the eligibility threshold or increasing the per meal rate for school lunches to keep pace with inflationary increases in food prices, wage levels or other costs.
Barbara Crowther, Children’s Food Campaign Manager says:
“Good nutrition is absolutely vital to children’s health and ability to learn. Whilst we welcome the Chancellor’s confirmation of funding for expanding school breakfast clubs, there were no crumbs of hope in this Autumn budget that the government will progressively end the disastrous means-testing in our school lunch system. We can only hope that the Child Wellbeing Bill and Child Poverty Taskforce will ensure every child has the vital nutritional safety nets, including Healthy Start and healthy school meals, they need.”
Taxing unhealthy food and drink
The Chancellor announced that the government will uprate the Soft Drinks Industry Levy from April 2025 to bring it in line with inflation since it was introduced since 2018. They also announced that they will review the current thresholds, as well as exemptions for milk-based and plant-based milk alternative drinks containing added sugar. However, they did not signal any further expansion of levies on other food and drink containing high levels of sugar and salt. Read the Recipe for Change coalition’s responses.
Barbara Crowther, Children’s Food Campaign Manager says:
“We welcome the strengthening of the Soft Drinks Industry Levy. It’s absolutely right that after six years, the government should now increase the penalties for all the companies who have not done enough to reduce the sugar levels in drinks, and we urge them to ensure all money raised by the levy is reinvested in children’s health.
“We hope this also signals a greater appetite from this government to create smart financial incentives for food companies to make healthier products. There is huge potential to apply this successful approach across a much wider range of food and drink that remain overloaded with high levels of sugar and salt, making companies pay more for producing unhealthy products, and increasing the number of healthier food and drink options for children and families everywhere.”
Nature-friendly farming
The Autumn Budget increases DEFRA's funding to £7.5 billion for 2025-26- an average real-terms growth rate of 2.7%. Key allocations include £2.4 billion for farming, with £1.8 billion earmarked for Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes aimed at bolstering resilient food security and environmental benefits. Labour are accelerating the end of Basic Payment Scheme (BPS) payments, with the fastest reductions in subsidies to those who historically received the largest payments.
Will White, Sustainable Farming Coordinator at Sustain says:
“We welcome the government's commitment to maintaining funding for Environmental Land Management (ELM) schemes. Prioritising the effective rollout of these schemes is the best way for the government to meet its environmental improvement targets while supporting long-term, resilient food security. While there is still much room for improvement in ELM schemes, this budget marks a promising step for the schemes. Now, it's crucial that DEFRA focus on easing the application process and quick payments to ensure that farmers can access funding swiftly.”
Sustain: Sustain The alliance for better food and farming advocates food and agriculture policies and practices that enhance the health and welfare of people and animals, improve the working and living environment, enrich society and culture and promote equity.