• The purpose of the National Food Strategy is to set out a vision to address the major issues facing the food system: climate change, biodiversity loss, land use, diet-related disease, health inequality, food security and trade, with a plan for how to achieve this vision
• This session will include an overview of some of the reasons such a strategy is needed, with a focus on current dietary intakes, obesity levels, sustainability and other nutritional issues

• Food security requires providing: sufficient, sustainable, safe, healthy and equitable supplies
• The UK’s food system faces both chronic and acute challenges in all 5 dimensions
• Current UK government policies aggravate rather than solve those challenges and ignore the 2021 National Food Strategy.
• Agricultural policy is being reduced to protecting biodiversity while leaving food prices and supplies entirely to ‘the market’, the big supermarkets
• A modernised ‘deficit payments system’ would incentivise greater agricultural domestic self-reliance, and help stabilise supplies and prices, without creating unsustainable surpluses. It could and should also address sustainability, safety, health and equity

• Addressing public health issues that arise from the wider food system, including air and water pollution, antimicrobial resistance, greenhouse gas emissions and other environmental impacts
• Looking at what can be done to prevent the negative interaction between the food chain and public health

• Ensuring that standards of food produced and imported are not lowered in the interests of securing new trade deals
• Maintaining an ongoing commitment to EU networks to promote high standards and quickly share risks across borders
• Recognising the importance of basing standards on the best scientific evidence and risk assessment
• Delivering business support through trading standards services and providing effective interventions to ensure business and consumer confidence in the market

• Delivering on the mission for everyone in the UK to take allergy seriously and preventing deaths from allergy
• Understanding the difference between allergy and intolerance and identifying allergens in ingredients
• Demonstrating how staff should communicate the allergen content of their dishes to each other and their customers
• Gaining insights into what to do when things go wrong and what the consequences are
• Complying with the new food labelling requirements for prepacked for direct sale food (PPDS)

• Global supply chains overview
• 4 key energies of reliable and predictable supply chains
• Knowing your supply chain
• Risk profiling & assessment
• Material sourcing strategies
• Managing change
• Managing disruption & escalating crisis

• Comparing levels of household food insecurity pre-pandemic and post-pandemic
• Examining the key drivers of food insecurity: lack of money; isolation and lack of supply
• Identifying groups in the population who are more vulnerable to food insecurity and how inequities have widened
• Exploring how households have obtained food during the pandemic including the use of food banks, government support and friends and family
• Setting out key recommendations to improve diets and food insecurity in the long-term

*agenda subject to change