More than 150 academics, business leaders, and food policy experts have written to Andy Burnham warning that Britain has no plan for feeding its population in a crisis. The open letter names climate disruption, geopolitical shocks, cyber-attacks, and energy outages as live threats to a food supply chain that holds almost no buffer stock. The UK's strategic food stockpile — maintained since World War II — was wound up by ministers in 1993. Nothing has replaced it. The core structural problem is the just-in-time delivery model that now underpins British food distribution. Supermarkets hold minimal inventory. No national, regional, or community food storage exists. The system was optimised for cost efficiency and private profit, not resilience. The signatories describe a food chain that is "highly wasteful, import-dependent, environmentally unsustainable, and driven by the pursuit of private profit rather than resilience, with millions of people unable to afford a decent, healthy diet." The letter makes five specific demands: local food resilience committees under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004, an audit of concentration among a few very large food companies, realignment of national food production around nutritional needs, multi-level food storage schemes, and decentralisation of the supply chain. These are structural asks, not emergency patches — they would require years of investment and institutional change. The timing is pointed. The National Audit Office recently rebuked ministers for failing to help households and businesses prepare for emergencies. The government's own research shows Britons are less prepared for catastrophic events than citizens of several European neighbours, while the UK is more import-dependent on food than comparable countries. Environment Secretary Angela Eagle has recommended households stockpile a few days' worth of food and water — advice the letter's authors note is meaningless for lower-income households who cannot afford to build reserves. Prof Tim Lang of the Centre for Food Policy at City St George's, University of London, called for a "system shift" involving more domestic food production, regional diversity, storage at multiple levels, and public engagement in civil food defence. Prof Paul Behrens of the Oxford Martin School at Oxford argued that food resilience, healthy diet, and environmental sustainability all point the same direction: growing more vegetables, fruit, and pulses closer to home. The Cabinet Office plans to launch a campaign telling households to stock up on tinned foods. Eagle has pledged farming improvements and a reservoir-building programme for extreme weather. These are incremental responses to a structural vulnerability. A campaign telling citizens to buy tinned meat does not address a food system where a handful of corporations control supply, imports cover a dominant share of consumption, and no institutional buffer exists between normalcy and shortage. The 20-year trajectory here is clear. Climate shocks are intensifying. Supply chain disruptions are becoming more frequent. Geopolitical weaponisation of food is not hypothetical — it is current practice. A system with no storage, no redundancy, and no plan is a system waiting for the wrong combination of shocks to arrive simultaneously.
