Food & drink exports are central to UK growth agenda

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A decade ago, you would have struggled to find more than one in 10 parliamentarians who were able to offer a coherent answer to questions about the importance of the food and drink industry to the UK economy. A garbled series of random sentences, including the words Tesco and whisky, would have sufficed for most members of either chamber.

Today – largely through the exposure unleashed by Brexit and Covid, and the advocacy of industry representative bodies and this august publication – even the dimmest MP will know ’food and drink employs more than four million people across farming, manufacturing, retail and hospitality’. Or that ‘every constituency has a food and drink facility employing at least 50 people’. Or that food and drink is at the heart of the thorniest issues when negotiating future agreements on international trade.

So the stage is set for food and drink to play its role in resolving the nation’s biggest challenge: how to deliver growth to the economy. In that endeavour, food and drink exports or the earnings from UK retail and hospitality formats could be decisive.

For the past 18 months, those of us who are members of the Food & Drink Export Council (FDEC) have been mapping out how to deliver that contribution. The Department for Business & Trade (DBT) and Defra have been working on practical ways to turbocharge our food exports, via a group of 20 industry practitioner and expert civil servants from the devolved administrations – each of which has an impressive track record in this arena.

British goods are widely admired around the world for their quality and taste. Well known are emblematic consumer winners like scotch, salmon and cheese. Less celebrated gems include equine feed in Japan and UK processed rice in Iceland. Though our largest firms and best-known brands are increasingly manufactured in the markets in which they are sold, small and medium-sized UK food and drink producers are far more likely than their opposite numbers in other industries to be exporting or to have done so in the recent past.

But there are major obstacles to our efforts. Many firms have pulled back from markets abroad because of the difficulties that have emerged for exporters over the past 10 years. The administrative and regulatory barriers erected by the scandalously incompetent EU-UK Trade & Co-operation Agreement continue to be comprehensively rehearsed in these and other pages.

Less appreciated are other concerns: the well-funded and hugely effective efforts of competitors like New Zealand; the supply chain consequences of escalating conflicts in the Middle East, eastern Europe and elsewhere; and, most difficult of all, the protectionist wave of national trade policies that has spread from self-proclaimed nationalists to even mainstream leaders around the world.

Prime minister Keir Starmer and Chancellor Rachel Reeves have made growth the big mission of this government. To my mind, there are three things that can deliver that growth. First, we must materially improve our national productivity. Second, we must invest much more in human capital (including skills and the health of our people) and our creaking infrastructure. And third, we must pull the exports lever dynamically across all of our industrial production and service provision.

The FDEC came to the end of its initial remit days after Rishi Sunak called the general election. We were already implementing high-impact/low-cost initiatives in partnership with industry – for example, a hugely popular pilot series of peer-to-peer events for new and returning exporters to absorb the wisdom of those already successful.

DBT says it is “considering how best to continue to work with industry to adopt an ambitious approach to increasing food and drink exports”. Of course, food and drink must take its place in Labour’s wider plans for a proper industrial strategy to drive growth. But the FDEC was ahead of the game. Its ideas are strong and ready to roll.

This is a moment to utilise that work and require the industry to respond. The admirable success of our friends at Bord Bia in Ireland shows what sustained modest investment can deliver, from a much smaller but very similar industrial and agricultural base.

This government’s thumping victory and early decisive actions mean it enjoys more goodwill than any for generations. I’m confident that our two key ministers – Johnny Reynolds and Daniel Zeichner – are listening. Now is the time for them to act and seize the opportunity that food and drink exports can deliver.