Select committee: Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee
Recommendation 1
Sixth Report - Public Sector Procurement of Food
Published 21 Apr 2021
Paragraph 17
Addressed to Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs
Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee Public Sector Procurement of Food All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
It is essential that the Government sets buying standards for public procurement of food in order to achieve value for money and ensure that high quality food, produced to high standards, is served by public bodies. However, standards are only effective if they are followed, and currently we do not have a clear picture of how frequently and effectively the Government Buying Standards for Food and Catering (GBSF) are being followed by public bodies. There is no coherent system for monitoring compliance where public bodies are mandated to follow the GBSF. This means that food supply chains cannot normalise around one set of baseline standards. A responsibility for monitoring compliance should be emphasised to or placed on existing inspection bodies, such as Ofsted (for schools) and the Care Quality Commission (for NHS Trusts), rather than creating new structures for inspection. These data should be reported to Government. Where such inspection bodies do not exist, Defra must gather data on compliance with the GBSF and the Balanced Scorecard through annual surveys, as it already does for government departments. It should publish the results of these surveys and name Departments that are not meeting the standards or fail to respond adequately to surveys.
From: Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, Sixth Report - Public Sector Procurement of Food (HC 469), paragraph 17, 21 April 2021
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 5 July 2021 (deadline 21 June 2021).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government welcomes the report and says the Committee's recommendations "align with our ambitions", with its main response being a consultation on updating the Government Buying Standards for Food and Catering Services (GBSF) this summer.
- On monitoring compliance, it says Ofsted and CQC inspectors "do not have the expertise" to assess the GBSF, and will "consider potential inspection bodies and remits" and seek views on alternative forms of monitoring in the consultation.
- On exemptions for overseas military and diplomatic supply, it says there is "no evidence that exemptions are being used" and that it "will consult on the removal of these exemptions".
- It agrees that the GBSF "requires updating" and has committed to a "substantial update", with the consultation looking at local produce, SME access and metrics on local, seasonal food.
- On the Future Food Framework pilot, it says the go-live date has been "delayed slightly" with a fully live capability indicated by the end of 2022, and it will provide a written update to the Committee by the end of December 2021.