100 signatures reached
To: Norwich City Council
Support The Food Waste & Food Poverty Motion
Vote in favour of Cllr Lucy Howard's motion on Food Poverty and Food Waste:
Council RESOLVES to:
1) Commend the work of the dedicated volunteers in Norwich
who feed hundreds of people each week
2) Ask cabinet to :-
a) Raise awareness of the work of food redistribution
organisations and the challenges they face through articles
in Citizen magazine.
b) Learn from other successful food redistribution
partnerships; for example those supported by Lambeth and
Bristol councils.
c) Work in partnership with local organisations who have
joined forces under the umbrella organisation Norwich Food
Hub to tackle the joint problems of increased food poverty
and the wasting of surplus food across the city, in order
understand the many challenges they face and help them
best achieve their objectives.
d) Help to build dialogue between the city’s large retailers
and the new hub, to ensure the most effective redistribution
of surplus food.
e) Work with Norfolk County Council, the Clinical
Commissioning Group and other public bodies to find
premises and funding to help local people who want to
redistribute surplus food to those in need.
f) Work with Norfolk County Council to encourage all food
retailers to sign up to a redistribution scheme in their area.
g) Lobby DEFRA to introduce penalties for large retailers
deliberately spoiling or wasting surplus food and to end the
retail practice of rejecting food on purely cosmetic grounds.
Why is this important?
It is estimated that supermarkets waste around 180,000 tonnes of food each year, with far higher waste in the supply chain caused by their unnecessary cosmetic standard policies, which contribute towards waste of around 3 million tonnes in the supply chain.
In Norwich there are over 7,000 children living in poverty, with the effects of childhood malnutrition lasting a lifetime at a significant cost to the taxpayer, with increased spending on social services, criminal justice, healthcare and extra educational support arising from an upbringing below the breadline.
The need to redistribute unsold food to those who can’t afford to feed themselves has become so urgent that a number of organisations have recently joined together to form Norwich Food Hub – which aims to collect food from supermarkets, bring it to a central city-centre location for sorting, and redistribute it to community groups helping those in food poverty.
Since forming we’ve been in contact with over 15 organisations interested in receiving food, including 6 breakfast and after-school clubs for young children. By supplying to these groups alone we could be feeding over 250 people each day.
Using food waste to feed the hungry is not a solution to food poverty. That should be addressed through fair and sustainable welfare policies. However whilst both food waste and food poverty co-exist we need to organise so that this food can be used to help people in need. Support from the Council would go a long way to achieving our aims and reducing food poverty in our city.
How it will be delivered
We will be handing the petiton
