MPs to debate food waste legislation 
Labour’s shadow secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, Kerry McCarthy, is today taking her food waste (reduction) bill for its second reading in the House of Commons. A report from the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, published this week, showed that the UK was throwing away 15m tonnes of food a year. Only 2% of the UK's surplus food waste is currently redistributed to charities. McCarthy, MP for Bristol East, said voluntary action by the food industry was failing to reduce food waste and that legislation was essential. Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall is also backing the bill.

Celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall has urged MPs to support a Labour bill designed to reduce supermarket food waste.

Labour’s shadow secretary of state for environment, food and rural affairs, Kerry McCarthy, will on Friday take her food waste (reduction) bill for its second reading in the House of Commons.

“The supermarkets need to step up and massively reduce the waste they cause in the food supply chain and that’s exactly what the food waste (reduction) bill calls on them to do,” said Fearnley-Whittingstall.

“They need to adhere to the principle that food that is fit to be eaten by people, should be eaten by people. It’s ridiculous that so much good food is going into anaerobic digestion, rather than being redistributed to people in need.”

A report from the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, published this week, showed that the UK was throwing away 15m tonnes of food a year. Only 2% of our surplus food waste is currently redistributed to charities.

McCarthy, MP for Bristol East, said voluntary action by the food industry was failing to reduce food waste and that legislation was essential. “My bill commits us to the UN goal of halving food waste by 2030, setting out a clear path for reducing food waste and ensuring perfectly good surplus food is donated to charities,” she said.

Fearnley-Whittingstall said that supermarkets needed to be transparent about how much food they were wasting “from farm, to production, through to retail” and come up with coherent, credible plan for reducing that waste. “I welcome this bill, and hope MPs get behind it, so we can put to an end the scandal of food being wasted on a huge scale,” he said.

This bill has cross-party support and its named supporters include Conservative London mayoral candidate Zac Goldsmith, the Green party’s only MP, Caroline Lucas, chairman of the work and pensions select committee, Frank Field, and shadow chief secretary to the treasury, Seema Malhotra.

In August, the United Nations claimed that if the amount of food wasted around the world were reduced by just 25% there would be enough food to feed all the people who are malnourished.

The organisation said that 1.3bn tonnes of food, about a third of all that is produced, is wasted each year, including about 45% of all fruit and vegetables, 35% of fish and seafood, 30% of cereals, 20% of dairy products and 20% of meat. Meanwhile, 795 million people suffer from severe hunger and malnutrition.