What did citizens find?

The Council found that organisations and initiatives in Liverpool & Merseyside are taking the lead on food insecurity, pioneering new and creative solutions other regions could follow. Citizens saw the difference a mobile greengrocer could make to local residents living in food deserts, and how community-owned farms and local market infrastructure can help get healthy, sustainable food to more people in the area. They also saw the wide-ranging benefits when schools and hospitals serve healthy, nutritious food – from improved learning and concentration in classrooms, to faster health and recovery outcomes for patients.

But barriers still exist to ensuring everyone can afford good food, close to home. Large food companies dominate the local food scene, flooding areas with cheap, unhealthy food and pushing out local businesses and organisations. Planning decisions also prevent local food businesses from flourishing.

Working with local leaders, they identified the conditions necessary for the region's food to thrive:

• A food system that works for people and places: businesses prioritising profit and volume over health use their scale to make cheap, heavily processed food ubiquitous, making it harder for businesses with health and sustainability at their core to compete and for people to get good food. Good food should be good business, and those businesses should be rewarded.
• Local food partnerships with the authority and stability to lead: where coordination exists – as with Feeding Liverpool – the system functions more coherently; but partnerships currently rely on goodwill and short-term support rather than the secure footing needed to drive change.
  
• Procurement systems that open doors to local and regional suppliers: public procurement is typically designed for national and global scale, locking out those best placed to supply their own communities – but places such as Bath and Somerset, Preston and Birmingham show that public procurement can be reformed to support local suppliers.
  
• Planning that shapes the food environment: high streets are filling with fast food and vape shops while good food businesses struggle to establish; planning has a role in creating the conditions for a healthier food environment.
  
• Infrastructure that connects food production to the people who need it: food deserts persist because the physical links – transport, markets, distribution – between where food is grown and where people live are missing or underfunded.
  

What is the Citizen Advisory Council?

The Citizen Advisory Council is a group of diverse citizens from across the UK, who are working with government on the development of the new Food Strategy. They bring with them a lived experience of the UK food system and a focus on what works for them, their family, their community and future generations of people living in the UK. In this phase of work, they are investigating what national government can learn from what's already happening in different places to transform food.

Find out more here.

Who was involved?

The following Citizen Advisory Council members led the What Works Here Inquiry in Liverpool & Merseyside:

Catherine McMinn, County Londonderry
Keira
Martin McCloy, County Antrim
Matthew Bixby, Gwynedd
Wena Isename, Edinburgh

The following people and organisations were involved in the inquiry:

Cllr Jane Corbett
Keenan Humble and Michael Fitzsimmons, Feeding Liverpool
Liz Fisher, Public Health Liverpool City Council
Chris Walsh, Kindling Farm
Dr Ian Sinha, Alder Hey Hospital
Daniel Heffy, GSG Hospitality
Michael Bracken, Liverpool City Council Markets
Angela Phillips, Food for Thought
Chris Walsh, Kindling Farm
Lucy Antal, Queen of Greens
Anita Welsh and Jackie Swanson, Squash Cafe and Grapes Community Garden

Next steps

In addition to coming to the Liverpool & Merseyside area, members of the Citizen Advisory Council have travelled to Cornwall, York and North Yorkshire and the North East Combined Authority. The next step is to present their findings to politicians and government officials through a series of reports, events and meetings – with representatives of the Council expected to meet with Defra Minister Angela Eagle later this year.