Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 4:20 pm on 14 December 2022.
Thank you, Huw. I think if you read through the explanatory memorandum, all 123 pages, you will find the answers to every one of those questions, in quite considerable detail, in many ways. You ask what can the Government get on with. Well, I've set food goals and targets, because there aren't any at the moment. There's who's holding who to account in the country for delivering against food goals. We're not seeing those. Public services are crying out for food goals, they're crying out for direction and things they can aspire to.
The costs, as I touched on earlier, I have to go through a certain process, as you'll be well aware, and we've given a range of costs in comparison to other commissioners. As I said earlier, if you truly embraced what this is trying to do and you wanted the future generations commissioner or another commissioner to embrace this, you would have to put resource into that to unlock the capacity to deliver this. If there is a desire for a food strategy and a system that delivers all we want—.
And when I say 'holistic', I say 'holistic' because it's the only word I can find to describe a whole picture. In my mind's eye, I regularly see a strategy. I see production at the bottom, a strategy over the top and the use of that food within that circle of life going to help the health of young people, helping those societal issues, driving the sustainable change. And, at the moment, the system does not do that. It satisfies the bottom of the circle—the production, the sustainable, hitting carbon, all this—but we have not seen a community food strategy that delivers against those wider societal issues.
In Scotland, you've got the Good Food Nation (Scotland) Act 2022, which is not dissimilar to what we're doing; you've got a strategy in England. There is no strategy here. There is no strategy, and you have to have a strategy to be able to start to deliver. And you need, like we've put here, goals and targets so that people can be held to account for making sure that we bring the change this country and our young people desperately need.