A clear vision, The Sussex Produce Company

Andrew Kay applauds Nick Hempleman of The Sussex Produce Company for his rousing speech at the launch of the Sussex Food & Drink Awards

I don’t often hand over the reins on this page but I was so impressed by Nick Hempleman’s speech at the launch of the Sussex Food & Drink Awards at the South of England Show that I want readers to share his pithy and visionary views on the subject of local, sustainable food for a growing population;

“I am a passionate supporter of local food but local food needs local outlets, local retailers and these are under threat. In five years, more than 13,000 specialist stores around the UK have closed and the small independents’ share of the grocery market has fallen to just six per cent, while the multiples’ share has increased to 88 per cent. A report from Manchester Metropolitan University suggests that at the current rate of demise, there will be no independent retailers left by 2050, and a report by the All-Party Parliamentary Small Shops Group predicts that many will have ceased trading by 2015.

Without local retailers, local wholesale markets have shrunk and disappeared and small scale local producers, the backbone of the countryside since Anglo Saxon times will have no outlet for their produce. These changes are not inevitable, indeed on the contrary, they are the result of conscious decisions by politicians, planners and regulators who have allowed giant, out-of-town supermarkets to destroy our high streets, to dismember our farming communities and to grow into effective monopolies.

For millennia local food was a way of life but over the last thirty years the growth of the big supermarkets has required the development of industrial sized farms, often abroad, to satisfy their enormous, centralised distribution systems. This model is neither sustainable nor local, nor in the interests of basic food security. Of course not all supermarkets are the same and the Southern Co-op is a great example of a community retailer, owned by its customers and genuinely championing local produce, but Tesco is coming up to having 40 million sq ft of selling space in the UK alone and that is before you take into account their new ‘farm shop’ concept they are rolling out in Dobbies Garden Centres across the country.

There is an alternative and that is to support the infrastructure that small scale food producers need.
Insist on public procurement of local food for hospitals and schools; Effective regulation against the big supermarkets and an end to the abuse of the planning system where councils are effectively blackmailed into approving new supermarkets because of the cost of fighting continuous legal appeals.

We need meaningful support for our high streets in the form of free car parking, legislation so landlords cannot leave commercial A1 properties empty for more than six months and a stream lining of the crippling bureaucratic burdens on small businesses (I’m thinking of the back office requirements of VAT, PAYE, National Insurance, P45s, P60s P35s, Health and Safety, Environmental Health, Licensing, Planning and Employment. It’s not that we don’t need those things, but that the system must be made more user friendly if small operations are to be able to comply.
We must also protect and support the fantastic initiatives like the local food festivals, farmers markets and high profile events such as the Sussex Food & Drink Awards. In tough times, the publicity generated by winning ‘Sussex Food Shop of the Year’ has really helped us and I am very grateful to everyone who organises this amazing initiative.

We are very lucky in Sussex to have some of the best food producers in the country but if local, sustainable food is to be more than a passing fashion we need root and branch change in how food is sold, or there will be no one left to sell it.”

Nick Hempleman
The Sussex Produce Company, Sussex Food Shop Of The Year 2011/2012
88 High Street, Steyning, West Sussex, BN44 3RD 01903 815045
www.thesussexproducecompany.co.uk