'Morally indefensible': Gove announces food waste crackdown in conference speech

Environment Secretary Michael Gove has today promised to tackle the problem of food waste with a new £15m scheme to redirect waste food from supermarkets to people in need.

Speaking this afternoon at the Conservative party conference in Birmingham, Gove said the initiative could prevent food with a retail value of almost £1bn being thrown away, by sending it to local charities and volunteer groups who will then distribute the meals.

Gove said the two-year pilot will start next year and deliver an extra 250 million more meals onto the plates of Britain's most vulnerable citizens. The focus will be on redistributing fresh food, with likely recipients including school breakfast clubs, the homeless and disabled groups.

"Nobody wants to see good food go to waste," Gove said. "It harms our environment, it's bad for business - and it's morally indefensible. Every year, around 100,000 tonnes of readily available and perfectly edible food is never eaten. This has got to change."

Retailers and food manufacturers currently redistribute around 43,000 tonnes of surplus food every year, but it is estimated that a further 100,000 tonnes of edible food goes uneaten, sent instead to energy-from-waste or anaerobic digestion plants.

The British Retail Consortium (BRC) insisted retailers are already working hard to cut the volume of edible food going to waste. "The supply of surplus food from the retail industry to charities has more than doubled in just two years - the equivalent of an additional 15 million meals," Alice Ellison, head of environment policy at the BRC, pointed out. "We will work with our members and the government, food businesses and the redistribution sector to facilitate and track progress."

And it's worth noting that supermarkets are the cause of only a fraction of the UK's food waste. Out of the 10.2 million tonnes of food waste generated in the UK each year, more than six million tonnes is produced by households - a figure that has proved tricky to bring down.

Elsewhere in his wide-ranging speech, Gove reiterated his promises to reform farming subsidies, maintain high environmental standards after Brexit, and introduce a new Environment Bill covering air quality and nature protection.

"We are the party of real progress and radical reform," he concluded. "And together, united, we can ensure that this country, and our world, are cleaner, greener and stronger."