4. What is the Welsh Government's strategy for tackling food insecurity in Cardiff? OQ56245

Llywydd, I thank the Member. The Welsh Government's strategy is to support innovation in both the statutory and third sectors in Cardiff, and then to work with successful initiatives that demonstrate the potential to help tackle food insecurity on a wider scale.

Thank you, First Minister for that answer. We've all seen the photos of cut-up carrots and peppers, which were supposed to be sufficient for making five lunches for free-school-meal families in England, and I'm sure you would share my shock that private companies have been permitted to charge £30 for such utterly inadequate food parcels. In contrast, all free-school-meals children in Cardiff have the security of vouchers to the value of nearly £20, which they can spend in the local supermarket of their choice.

The pandemic has unfortunately exposed how poor diets translate into poor health and makes disadvantaged families so much more likely to catch and die of COVID than families who can afford nourishing food, and that situation is not helped by the disruption to everyday foods imported from the EU. The green recovery action plan devised by Sir David Henshaw and others has some excellent ideas for tackling our insecure food system, including urban agriculture where it's most needed, increasing the number of people who know how to grow food, and connecting growers with local markets. But having spoken to the head of the Trussell Trust in Wales, it's unclear whether this will be sufficient to stem the rise and rise of families needing to turn to foodbanks in these incredibly difficult times. What role can the Welsh Government play, either through its own procurement policies or other strategies, to tackle the food insecurity and poor diet that coronavirus has exposed as such a major contributor to chronic ill health and vulnerability to disease?

Llywydd, I thank Jenny Rathbone for those follow-up questions. I'm afraid I'm old enough to remember when, during the Thatcher era, the Conservative-controlled Shropshire County Council served potted meat sandwiches to its free school meals children for Christmas dinner one year. So, it's no surprise to me at all to find that, when a public service delivers something for children in need, then they get a better deal than when this is hived off to profit-making friends of the Conservative Party.

I agree with the Member about the Henshaw report, and I'm very grateful to all those who contributed to it. I was able to meet the group early on in their work, and it does provide us with some very practical ideas of how we can make sure that, as we recover from coronavirus, we're able to do so in a way that puts our environment, and the place that food has in that, at the top of our agenda.

Llywydd, the Member asked for some examples of what the Welsh Government is able to do, and here are, very quickly, just a small number. As I said, what we try and do is invest in ideas and then make those ideas go further when they turn out to be good ones. In my own constituency, Llywydd, the Dusty Forge project is a fantastic project that hosted the first pantry scheme in Wales. That's now gone to other parts of Wales, including, I know, Glenwood church in the Member's own constituency. Just before Christmas, my colleague Lee Waters announced £100,000 to take into Valley communities the Big Box Bwyd scheme that had started in the Vale of Glamorgan, has been successfully demonstrated in two pioneer schools in Barry, and will now be available to five schools in Merthyr, Aberdare, Maesteg and Rhydaman.

I'll give a final example, Llywydd, on a lightly bigger scale—Carmarthenshire County Council, in partnership with its local health board and its local university is using money through the foundational economy challenge fund is finding ways in which the public sector procurement of local food can both provide better food in hospitals, in colleges and in older people's homes, but will also secure supply, strengthen local economies and reduce the carbon footprint. Working with the Centre for Local Economic Strategies, we are also looking to take those ideas and to implant them in other local areas in Wales.

First Minister, this is a very important area, and I've been very impressed by the food co-operatives that established food clubs whereby members for a modest fee get access to a wide range of fresh fruit and vegetables. But also, they're given the chance to improve their cooking skills if that is required, and indeed, when the pandemic is over and we can meet socially again, meet to share their experiences and prepare food together—skills, then, that obviously they take to their households. These sorts of innovations I think have a lot to recommend them, because I think there's a natural desire to eat well, and cooking, when you have the skills, is not the chore that it can present itself as, if you really don't know how to tackle a lot of the food substances that are available to you.

Well, Llywydd, I think David Melding makes a very important point that the natural human instinct is to share food and to use the sharing of food as the basis for social interaction. I'm sure I'm not the only Member of the Senedd who ate a virtual Christmas dinner this year with family members far away in Wales, and great as it is to see people even in that way, it's no substitute for what David Melding talked about—about people getting around the table together and sharing a meal. But I think his first example—what he talked about in relation to food co-operatives—is very important. The pantry scheme that I referred to, answering Jenny Rathbone, is just an example of that. Everybody pays £5 into the scheme and then is able to draw food out of the collective stock.

And while foodbanks do a fantastic job, sad as it is to require that job to be done, what the pantry scheme does is to get over that sense that people who use foodbanks have of being dependent on them, of being in a client relationship. With the pantry, you're a member, as you are in a co-op, and you've paid in and you take out of it by right, and that changes the whole dynamic. And more developments of that sort would have benefits of the sort that David Melding referred to, but they would have wider benefits as well in giving people that sense of social worth and dignity, which we, I know, would both wish to see.