30 March
Dear George Eustice,
Given your background in farming and your ministerial role, you must be only too aware that the UK is facing a crisis in food security. This has been brewing for a long time, but is being felt ever more keenly this year in the context of world events.
In the UK, we import almost half of the food we eat and that proportion is rising, rendering us still more vulnerable to market shocks in global food prices. The Food Foundation reports that the invasion of Ukraine ‘will have a significant impact on food security’ in Britain and globally. Rising food costs are of course a key contributor to the broader cost of living crisis at a time when we are seeing inflation at a thirty-year high.
While the government will doubtless need to intervene in the short term to ensure that families on low incomes can afford to eat, the subject of this letter is the longer-term resilience that we must build into our food supply. I believe that one crucial aspect of a sustainable food system is to empower more individuals to grow some of their own food.
It is a matter of national pride that the Dig for Victory campaign during WWII saw immense success in reducing Britain’s reliance on food imports. The Royal Horticultural Society reports that by the end of the war, nearly 1.4m allotments were responsible for producing 1.3m tonnes of produce. Fast forward to the present, and the number of allotments is greatly diminished, but demand is soaring. People absolutely want to grow their own food, for the host of benefits to their health and wellbeing, as well as to save money. Infamously long allotment waiting lists are still growing. A recent study found that 37% of councils report more than a thousand people on waiting lists for allotments.
Over a third of councils say they are looking to increase their allotment provision, but the lack of funding and a cohesive national strategy is seeing them fall short. I sit on the committee of Wrexham Avenue Allotments Association in Walsall, and we have been trying fruitlessly for several years to get the access driveway to our council-owned allotment site resurfaced, as it is severely and dangerously degraded. We are told that there is no money. So if councils cannot even maintain existing allotment sites, what hope have we for meaningfully expanding provision to meet the phenomenal demand?
Mr Eustice, we need a system-level change here. We need to treat allotments and other urban spaces seriously as contributors to national food production. We need to empower people to produce food themselves and reduce their vulnerability to supermarket price hikes. In doing so, we will also see improvements in physical and mental health, in community cohesion, in carbon emissions and in biodiversity.
What would a system-level change look like? An immediate measure would be to meaningfully increase local government funding for allotments and community garden schemes, to pay for overdue maintenance on existing sites and acquisition and conversion of land for new sites. This could be accompanied by a national strategy and dedicated officers to identify land for potential allotment use, promote a new Dig-for-Victory-inspired campaign for both private and community gardens, and provide resources in support of urban food production. Requirements could be set out for all new housing developments to include community growing space. Public buildings could create community roof gardens and terraces.
The possibilities are vast, Mr Eustice, and you are in a position to effect and influence the changes we need to see. Those changes begin with substantially increased funding for allotments and other urban growing projects, and culminate in a revolutionary national urban food network that sets an example for the world to follow.
Yours sincerely,
Christopher Crompton
Christopher Crompton
Christopher Crompton