IN Brief:
- NFU, BRC, FDF, and UKHospitality have called for a five-point plan to support UK food security.
- The priorities cover consumer value, EU realignment, planning, labour, investment, and growth.
- The joint intervention links farming, manufacturing, retail, and hospitality in one resilience agenda.
The National Farmers Union, the British Retail Consortium, the Food and Drink Federation, and UKHospitality have called for the next Prime Minister to work with the food and drink sector on a five-point plan for food security.
The organisations are urging government to focus on delivering value for the public, securing a well-negotiated EU realignment, improving planning, ensuring access to workers, and supporting investment and growth. The joint letter frames food security as an economic, industrial, and consumer issue rather than a narrow agricultural concern.
The farm to fork sector is worth more than £153bn to the UK economy and supports more than four million jobs across the supply chain. That scale makes food security a manufacturing and infrastructure issue as much as a farming or retail issue. Processing plants, packaging suppliers, storage facilities, cold chain networks, ingredients producers, logistics providers, and foodservice operators all sit within the same operating system.
EU realignment remains one of the clearest priorities because friction at the border affects ingredients, finished goods, packaging materials, veterinary certification, groupage, chilled exports, and short shelf-life products. Even modest delays can create cost and waste where products depend on tight temperature control or limited shelf life.
Planning reform is another central theme. Farmers and manufacturers both need permission to invest in productive infrastructure. On farm, that can mean poultry sheds, reservoirs, manure storage, energy systems, and handling facilities. In food manufacturing, it can mean factory extensions, utilities, access roads, wastewater treatment, packaging lines, automation, refrigeration, and warehousing.
Labour remains difficult across the sector. Farms, processors, warehouses, hauliers, hospitality businesses, and retailers all depend on reliable staffing. Automation can reduce some pressure, but it does not remove the need for skilled operators, engineers, quality teams, drivers, planners, food safety specialists, and seasonal workers.
Investment and growth complete the industrial case. Food and drink is the UK’s largest manufacturing sector, yet many businesses face high energy bills, complex regulation, tight retail negotiations, and capital constraints. New technology, healthier reformulation, packaging compliance, productivity improvements, and export development all require investment before they produce returns.
The letter also links affordability with resilience. Consumers need access to a wide range of safe, nutritious, and affordable food, but affordability cannot be delivered sustainably by squeezing each part of the chain until investment stops. Farms need viable margins, processors need reliable demand and capital headroom, and retailers need efficient supply.
The same industrial logic is visible in European policy, where the Commission’s protein resilience plan connects crop production, livestock strategy, processing capacity, and import dependency. The UK debate is different in legal and political terms, but the underlying pressure is similar: governments are being forced to treat food supply as strategic infrastructure.
Recent years have exposed weaknesses across the system. Energy volatility, weather extremes, labour shortages, trade friction, fertiliser costs, animal disease, packaging inflation, and transport pressure have all raised operating costs. Businesses have adapted, but adaptation often comes through higher inventories, extra administration, more expensive logistics, and delayed investment.
Food security policy therefore needs to move beyond emergency response. A more resilient system requires predictable regulation, faster planning, targeted support for technology adoption, better trade processes, and a labour framework that reflects the needs of perishable production.
The joint intervention is notable because it brings together organisations that do not always have identical priorities. Farmers, manufacturers, retailers, and hospitality operators may disagree on pricing, margins, and regulation, but they share exposure to a fragile operating environment. A poorly functioning system raises costs for all of them.
The next government will face difficult trade-offs. Food prices remain politically sensitive, while businesses need room to invest in productivity, sustainability, and capacity. Treating those goals as separate will not work. Food affordability depends on productive assets, skilled labour, efficient logistics, and trade routes that function reliably.
The five-point plan is an industrial resilience agenda in practical terms. It asks government to recognise that food security is built through physical infrastructure, technical capability, commercial confidence, and regulatory clarity. Without those conditions, the system can still feed the country, but with less margin for shock.
