IN Brief:
- UK households spent £148 billion on food in 2025, while the agri-food sector supported 4.1 million jobs.
- The NAO says recent shocks were absorbed, but the system has not been tested against catastrophic national food disruption.
- Defra is being urged to improve critical-asset mapping, emergency exercises, and industry involvement in resilience planning.
National Audit Office scrutiny of the UK’s food supply chain has found that industry absorbed recent shocks without systemic failure, while warning that the country’s ability to withstand a catastrophic disruption remains untested.
UK households spent £148 billion on food in 2025, excluding eating out, while the agri-food sector supported 4.1 million jobs across Great Britain and generated £162.3 billion in gross value added in 2024.
The UK also combines domestic production with extensive international sourcing. Its food self-sufficiency ratio was around 60% in 2025, meaning domestically produced food represented an estimated 60% of the value consumed, while domestic production remained dependent on imported inputs such as fertiliser and animal feed.
The system has absorbed repeated shocks in recent years, including the COVID-19 pandemic, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, energy disruption, extreme weather, and cyber attacks. Overall availability was maintained, but operating costs rose and food price inflation peaked at 19.2% in March 2023.
That resilience has relied heavily on commercial flexibility. Businesses have changed suppliers, altered sourcing routes, adjusted operations, and used international markets to keep products moving. The NAO’s concern is that these mechanisms have not been tested against a severe national event in which several critical dependencies fail at the same time.
Food is one of the UK’s 13 Critical National Infrastructure sectors, yet the government has historically not designated individual food-sector assets as critical. That creates a gap between recognising food as essential and identifying which distribution centres, production sites, cold stores, transport links, utilities, or other assets would need priority during an emergency.
Defra began exploring the inclusion of food assets in the government’s CNI Knowledge Base in late 2025, initially focusing on supermarket distribution centres. The NAO says better use of the system could improve understanding of critical infrastructure and the dependencies that connect food with electricity, water, chemicals, communications, and transport.
Emergency testing is another weakness. The last national exercise specifically testing severe food-supply disruption took place in 2023 and identified limitations in preparedness. Subsequent exercises have covered risks including cyber incidents, pandemics, power outages, and animal disease, but food businesses told auditors that greater private-sector involvement would improve planning.
A processor cannot maintain output without electricity, water, refrigeration, ingredients, packaging, labour, waste handling, transport, and functioning digital systems. Substituting an unavailable ingredient or packaging material can also require specification, allergen, quality, and traceability checks before an alternative can enter production.
Defra has increased the capacity of its Food Supply Chain Resilience team and retains mechanisms developed during the pandemic, including the Food Resilience Industry Forum. The NAO nevertheless found that industry engagement has become less frequent since COVID-19 and that businesses had limited involvement in the department’s food-supply disruption playbook.
Gareth Davies, head of the National Audit Office, said: “Recent disruptions have shown the resilience of the UK’s food supply chain, but risks are increasing in likelihood and severity.” He called for plans to be tested more thoroughly with industry and local government.
International comparisons show more formal models. Finland maintains government-owned grain reserves covering around nine months of consumption and a register of roughly 1,500 companies considered critical to society, with regular information exchange between government and industry.
Sweden is piloting investment in state-owned mobile power generation for critical parts of the food supply chain during outages, has begun building government-owned grain reserves, and is considering mobile milling capacity. These measures are not directly transferable to every UK risk, but they show how other countries have identified particular assets and capabilities for deliberate protection.
The report also points to weaknesses in local preparedness. Local resilience forums are expected to support vulnerable people during emergencies, yet the NAO found uncertainty over responsibilities and low confidence in systems used to identify and assist those most at risk. Defra plans further work with retailers and local bodies on emergency food distribution.
National supply can remain available while local access fails. A resilient manufacturing base does not by itself guarantee that food reaches the places where it is needed if power, transport, communications, or retail distribution are disrupted simultaneously.
The UK system has generally favoured competition, global sourcing, commercial inventory decisions, and tightly managed operating costs. Those characteristics help businesses respond quickly to disruption, but they can also leave little spare capacity when multiple services or suppliers are unavailable.
The NAO does not argue that every food facility should be treated as strategic infrastructure or that government should replace commercial responsibility. Its conclusion is narrower: the private sector has dealt with recent disruption, but Defra’s current arrangements do not yet demonstrate that the country is prepared for an event severe enough to overwhelm normal substitution and sourcing mechanisms.
The next phase of Defra’s resilience work is expected to include further critical-asset mapping and greater testing with industry and local government. That work will determine whether the UK’s food resilience can be demonstrated through operating evidence rather than inferred from crises that, serious as they were, stopped short of catastrophic system failure.
