Exeter City Council is expected to adopt a new food policy on Tuesday. Brainchild of Labour’s Duncan Wood, who spearheads the council’s response to climate change, the policy has taken months to prepare since he proposed it last year.
Its aim was “to ensure food provided at internal council meetings would be plant-based” and that “all council run external sites including leisure centres, cafes and restaurants have plant-based options available”.
In addition to council meetings it would apply to event catering at the Corn Exchange and Guildhall and council cafes at RAMM, the Matford Centre, the ISCA centre and St Sidwell’s Point.
However there are comprehensive exclusions in the resulting policy smallprint. It doesn’t apply to private hire at any of these venues, or to leased concessions (which include the cafe at RAMM), or to vending machines or drinks of any kind.
An accompanying report admits that only “limited” catering takes place at council venues in any case and the handful of events that are catered at the Guildhall are already 80% vegetarian. The cafe at St Sidwell’s Point already offers plenty of vegan and vegetarian options too.
St Sidwell’s Point cafe
The new policy is also wrapped and stuffed with weasel words, offering plenty of wriggle-room for council cafe and catering managers. All its provisions are qualified and so are largely unenforceable.
It invites council venues to “aim” to offer half plant-based and half dairy, meat and fish menu options, while fish should be sustainably-sourced and ultra-processed products avoided “where possible”. The “aim” should be to prioritise local suppliers, and purchasers should do the right thing “wherever practical”, selecting certified organic foods “where practical and cost effective”.
As there is no budget for the policy, “cost effective” means cafe and catering managers offsetting higher prices by buying less food to sell, or councillors cutting spending elsewhere to compensate.
And the policy does not apply to council meetings at all, as observed by the council’s deputy leader at a meeting of Labour councillors last week. She pointed out that the council hasn’t provided food at its meetings “for a good two years”.
The policy’s contribution to the climate crisis is harder to quantify. Apparently it “should have a small positive impact” on the council’s carbon emissions, but no figure is provided.
RAMM cafe
This is a striking omission, as the primary focus of Duncan Wood’s policy proposals was “the effect dietary choices can have on individual carbon footprints”.
It seems the “Plant Based Task and Finish Group” of five councillors and three council officers he led, which met four times in February and March to examine them, was neither able to determine their impact potential nor gather any information about the scale of council food buying at all.
It also appears to have been hamstrung by ignorance of sustainable food production. An invited group of local farmers and NFU and BFU representatives had to point out “the values and benefits of mixed farming” in preference to relying on petrochemical fertilisers despite the noisily hostile reception the council’s plant-based policy announcement had already received the previous month.
The BFU said: “The whole issue of using plant-based foods flies directly in the face of sustainability. Many alternatives to meat consumption are based on products grown on land on the other side of the world.”
East Devon MP Simon Jupp went further: “I think what Exeter City Council is doing here is a load of virtue-signalling nonsense and it’s also a big let-down for local farmers. Meat and dairy farmers surround Exeter. They produce amazing food. The city council should be celebrating that.”
The council task force did eventually divine the lay of the land. Its resulting report cites a Public Health England healthy eating guide which includes meat, fish and dairy products, and the council now supports regional food strategies which emphasise the value of mixed farming approaches.
These include University of Exeter research on the potential for the South West public sector to strengthen food supply chains by buying from local farmers and the Devon Food Partnership’s Good Food Strategy, which is connected to the Devon Carbon Plan. Neither is “plant-based”.
Public Health England healthy eating guide
The city council seems to have been wrong-footed by the publication of the Devon Good Food Strategy despite the Devon Food Partnership launching more than two years earlier and its monthly steering group meetings involving a wide range of regional representatives.
Victoria Hatfield, the city council’s net zero lead, said the strategy “came out just after we’d written the policy”, and that her team “will be making contact with the Devon Food Partnership”.
She also seems to have understood that the council might encounter difficulties introducing a plant-based menu in at least one of its cafes, saying that putting the new policy together had been “quite challenging” because of variations between the council venues to which it applies.
A council risk assessment puts this differently, identifying “a risk of losing a competitive position if the unique nature and location of some of our public facing catering venues are not taken into account”.
While it does not say so, this must surely be a reference to the cafe at the Matford Centre, the council-owned home of Exeter’s busy livestock market which is expected to make a profit of nearly half a million pounds next year and at which many of the county’s farmers regularly take tea.
The council, or at least its climate change portfolio holder, also seems not to recognise the limited scope of the new food policy compared with the decarbonisation challenges it faces, let alone the colossal scale of the whole city’s carbon footprint.
Six months before Duncan Wood proposed his plant-based policy the University of Exeter calculated the city council’s 2020-21 corporate greenhouse gas emissions. The carbon footprint of council catering or cafes did not figure in its rigorous analysis of 50 emissions categories across all three scopes.
It did, however, identify bigger fish to fry. The construction of St Sidwell’s Point alone was responsible for around 16,000 tCO2e of the council’s 53,000 tCO2e emissions that year. All 4,800 of the city’s council houses would have to be comprehensively retrofitted to offset this impact. Only 420 have been completed so far: the rest will take another twenty years at current delivery rates, which have been temporarily boosted by large government grants.
As retrofitting the council’s housing stock is likely to take even longer, perhaps its climate policy lead could instead focus on this target, which would meaningfully improve the city’s carbon emissions position as well as the lives of its tenants by reducing their fuel bills.
He could also prioritise related problems including the need to decarbonise the rest of the city’s 56,000 residential dwellings, not to mention its non-residential buildings, or addressing the fact that the council’s Passivhaus programme is expected to substantially increase its carbon footprint.
Exeter faces a long list of challenges that Duncan Wood could chew on which have much greater climate crisis mitigation potential than council food policy. Unfortunately we may be out of luck: he said he found the council’s catering and cafes setup “incredibly complex”.
Meanwhile the council’s newly-employed net zero officers, who understand both the big picture and the detail, are to be tasked with developing impact indicators to monitor his new food policy and delivering ten other paltry recommendations of his “Plant Based Task and Finish Group”.
