Better Together: Integration and Inclusion in Food Policy Reform

Fragmentation has long described the UK’s approach to our food system. And with the challenges facing our food system increasing—from climate impacts threatening production to rising food insecurity and diet-related illness—this approach is failing to deal with these interconnected issues. But could 2025 mark a turning point for UK food policy?

At the end of 2024, Defra Secretary Steve Reed signalled potential change, gathering 750 food sector leaders to announce plans for a new food strategy for England. The strategy aims to set up the food system for long-term success in nourishing citizens and protecting the planet while introducing new approaches to policy development. Reed emphasized cross-departmental collaboration, co-design with stakeholders, and coordination with devolved administrations—marking a shift from traditional ways of working.

But turning these promises into practice demands more than good intentions. Reed’s commitments point to two essential principles for effective food policy reform: integration and inclusion. His emphasis on cross-departmental collaboration and coordination with devolved administrations recognizes the need for integration at multiple levels—bringing together different policy areas and departments within England while ensuring coherence across UK nations. His promise of stakeholder co-design speaks to inclusion—ensuring meaningful participation from those affected by food system decisions.

As previous attempts at food system reform have shown, success depends on getting both principles right. This article explores how together integration and inclusion can transform food policy, drawing on lessons from existing success stories across the UK.

Why food policy needs to connect the dots

Integration in food policy means recognizing and responding to the inherently interconnected nature of food system challenges. Many urgent food issues—from obesity to climate impacts—are systemic, meaning their causes and outcomes are complex and interconnected, spanning multiple policy domains. Yet traditionally, government responsibilities are split between departments focused on specific areas like health, agriculture or trade, creating a fundamental mismatch between the nature of food challenges and how we govern them.

Without integration, policies can undermine each other, waste resources through duplication, or allow important issues to fall through the cracks. A mapping exercise of cross-government work on food systems issues identified some important areas where issues are being approached (or aspire to be so) in a connected way, but also identified 14 major disconnects across areas including agriculture, climate change, public health and the supply chain. The government’s sugar policy illustrates this perfectly: agricultural policy has supported sugar beet production while health policy implements a sugar tax to reduce consumption. Similar contradictions arise with climate change, where agriculture policy has subsidized farming practices that produce greenhouse gas emissions while climate policy attempts to reduce them.

The government’s proposed strategy explicitly recognizes these challenges through its governance structure. While Defra will lead the work, close collaboration is promised with the Department of Health and Social Care and the Department for Education, coordinated through Cabinet Office mission boards. This cross-government approach acknowledges that food policy touches public health to environmental protection and education, offering the potential for the joined-up thinking that has too often been missing.

However, past attempts at food policy reform highlight significant challenges in achieving these ambitions. The 2022 Government Food Strategy demonstrated how easily cross-government initiatives can become siloed again into departmental responsibilities. And to succeed, the new strategy must also bring in departments beyond the usual suspects—particularly the Department for Work and Pensions to address food insecurity and the Department for Business and Trade to support sustainable food businesses.

Bringing everyone to the table: The power of inclusion

Inclusion in food policy means ensuring that those affected by food system decisions have meaningful input into making them. Too often decisions are made by government departments consulting primarily with established industry stakeholders. This can leave many outside of the process, resulting in policy being “done to people rather than with them”. True inclusion requires engaging with diverse voices—from farmers to food workers, community organizations to consumers—to understand how policies affect people’s real lives and experiences.

The government’s new strategy recognizes this through its commitment to co-design via a delivery board involving food system stakeholders. This marks an important shift from traditional consultation approaches. Past experience shows why such inclusion matters: policies developed without sufficient engagement often fail to address real-world needs. School food standards, for instance, have struggled where they were designed without adequately involving the schools and suppliers who must implement them.

But inclusion isn’t just about better policy design—it’s essential for navigating the complex trade-offs inherent in food system change. Policies affect groups differently. For example, reducing the regulatory burden on food businesses can result in lower food quality for consumers, or regulatory requirements that aim to protect the environment can affect the ability of producers to earn a living wage. In these situations, inclusive processes help broker compromises and build legitimacy for difficult choices. The strategy’s emphasis on working with the sector to shape what it looks like acknowledges that lasting change requires bringing affected communities into the process of developing solutions.

Meanwhile, there are also risks of vested interests undermining reform efforts, particularly from sectors resistant to change. Without robust governance structures and clear accountability measures, even well-intentioned collaboration can falter.

Stronger together: Why neither works alone

The Secretary of State’s announcement, with commitments to cross-government working and stakeholder co-design, signals recognition that integrated and inclusive governance is essential for an effective food strategy. The key is that they must go together to deliver the systemic change needed in our food system.

Integration without inclusions risks disconnection from real-world needs

When government departments coordinate without meaningful stakeholder engagement, the resulting policies can be technically coherent but practically unworkable. The development of obesity strategies illustrates this well. While departments have worked together on interventions to reduce obesity, policies have often faltered because they failed to meaningfully engage with communities’ lived experiences of food poverty and practical constraints on food choices. Though departments aligned their objectives they missed crucial real-world barriers to implementation because they lacked inclusive input.

Inclusion without integration can lead to partial solutions and unintended consequences

Conversely, stakeholder engagement without cross-government integration tends to produce partial solutions that don’t address underlying systemic challenges. The fragmented approach to children’s food interventions illustrates this problem clearly, with responsibilities split across three different departments and multiple schemes.

Despite extensive consultation with schools and suppliers, programs meant to support children’s nutrition remain split across multiple departments: the Department for Education managing school meals and breakfast clubs, the Department of Health and Social Care overseeing Healthy Start vouchers, and Defra running the School Milk and Fruit and Vegetable scheme. This fragmentation of responsibility for children’s nutrition across different departments creates significant challenges, leading to gaps in coverage, inconsistent policy implementation, and missed opportunities to improve children’s nutrition and health outcomes.

While each department engages with relevant stakeholders, there is a lack of cross-government coordination with no overarching structure to establish and deliver greater policy coherence. This fragmentation is particularly problematic given that no single department is responsible for tackling hunger—an issue that particularly affects children. Without clear departmental ownership or coordinated delivery of these various food programmes, neither the immediate challenge of child hunger nor the broader goal of supporting children’s nutrition can be effectively addressed.

The power lies in combining these approaches

When integration and inclusion work together, stakeholder insights help surface the real-world complexities that demand coordinated responses, while cross-government working ensures these insights inform coherent policy. When done well, integrated and inclusive governance is mutually reinforcing. This is why the delivery board structure proposed in the new strategy holds promise—it creates a mechanism for bringing together departmental coordination and stakeholder input from the start. Getting the balance right will be a challenge, particularly in such a complex policy space with a wide range of issues and trade-offs to consider – but it’s a challenge we must meet.

Making it work: Lessons from Scotland and Wales

The Secretary of State’s commitments to cross-government working and stakeholder co-design offer promising foundations. But translating these intentions into effective practice requires careful attention to process design. While England’s new strategy presents an opportunity for fresh thinking, we need not start from scratch. As I’ve explored from different angles previously, the experiences of devolved administrations offer valuable insights, with innovative approaches already offering lessons for good practice. More still can be learned for how integration and inclusion can be operationalized in a wider context.

Blueprint for change: Lessons from devolved governance

Scotland’s Good Food Nation Act demonstrates how formal structures can embed both cross-government coordination and meaningful stakeholder participation. Its requirement for national and local food plans creates clear accountability for joined-up action, while the Scottish Food Commission provides independent oversight and ensures diverse voices shape implementation.

Similarly, Wales’s Well-being of Future Generations Act shows how participatory approaches can work in practice, with its commissioner role advocating for long-term thinking and public bodies required to engage communities in policy development.

From theory to practice: Building blocks for England’s new strategy

Drawing on these lessons, three elements appear critical for a more inclusive and integrated process for England’s food strategy development.

1.??????? The proposed delivery board must have genuinely balanced representation—across government departments and including farmers, food workers, civil society groups, academics, and citizens alongside industry voices. The Secretary of State’s commitment to working across the agri-food system sectors should fully embrace this broader range of perspectives.

2.??????? Mechanisms for ongoing stakeholder input must extend beyond initial consultation. The Secretary of State’s promise of “structured engagement” could be realized through regional dialogues and themed working groups that feed directly into strategy development.

3.??????? Formal links with devolved administrations should be established early. While the strategy focuses on England, many food system challenges cross borders. The delivery board could include cross-nation representation, creating opportunities for alignment where beneficial, while maintaining space for nation-specific innovation. The commitment to ensuring coherence across the UK provides a foundation for such collaboration.

Making it real: From good intentions to good practice

Promises of integration and inclusion sound good in principle, but without the right structures in place, they risk becoming empty rhetoric. The food sector, civil society, and citizens must hold the government to account to avoid falling back into fragmented policymaking that fails to deliver real change. This will help to ensure that commitments made today turn into lasting reform. Now is the time to demand clear governance structures, meaningful participation, and independent oversight. Without these features, we risk another missed opportunity that we can’t afford.

I write about the future of food and the connections between our food systems, the environment and public health. Sign up for my newsletter.

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