Summary

  • The 6 October workshop put the last mile on the table: during a national blackout, who moves essential goods from businesses into communities? The new group can advise, but it cannot direct the response.
  • The National Audit Office found no food-supply assets in the government’s Critical National Infrastructure Knowledge Base, and Defra considered its existing and planned emergency powers insufficient to direct businesses during a catastrophic event.
  • The 6 October launch meeting discussed a national power outage and local distribution. It produced a record of discussion, not proof that an operational response has been tested.
  • The governance test is whether the forum can help publish a usable map of triggers, decision owners and local hand-offs while leaving operating choices with the organisations that must make them.

One scope line matters: the National Audit Office examined Defra’s responsibilities in England and excluded its work with the devolved administrations. Defra describes the new group as preparing the UK food system.

A workshop opened with the hard part: moving the goods

The first published account of the FPG starts at the end of a supply chain. During its inaugural meeting on 6 October, members took part in a short workshop about moving essential goods from industry into communities during a catastrophic national power outage. The summary records discussion about local responders, authorities, community organisations and support networks. It also records a practical dependency question: how would goods get from a business into a neighbourhood when normal distribution routes and utilities were in trouble?

That is a more useful starting point than a picture of empty shelves. The audit found that the food system maintained overall availability during recent disruptions, in most cases with limited government intervention. Businesses switched suppliers or sourced alternatives. The report does not describe a catastrophic failure of food supply. It says that event has not happened, and that government would need to intervene much more heavily if it did.

The two records describe different operating conditions. Commercial incentives can keep products moving when companies can adapt within the existing system. A national power outage, major infrastructure failure or widespread supply interruption can reach past the point where each company’s own continuity plan is enough. At that threshold, the response depends on public decisions, local capability and business cooperation arriving in the right order.

The FPG gives those participants a place to discuss the hand-offs. Defra established it in October 2026 after the NAO report had identified gaps in preparedness. The group has two strands: one for supply-chain business preparedness and one for local and household preparedness. Its terms ask it to discuss acute and catastrophic risks, test plans and assumptions, and identify where further action is needed.

The forum has a boundary by design

Defra’s 19 October Terms of Reference call the FPG a stakeholder advisory group. It is not a decision-making body. Final programme decisions remain with Defra and government ministers; the group’s advice does not bind Defra or its participants. The arrangement preserves the authority of the bodies that hold statutory duties and of the organisations that operate each link in the chain.

That boundary is sensible. A group that includes public, private and civil-society organisations cannot quietly acquire powers that Parliament assigned elsewhere. Nor should attendance be mistaken for an operational commitment. Members can bring evidence and challenge, then take agreed messages back to their organisations. The forum can make coordination easier; it cannot make every participant accept a new obligation by showing up.

The distinction matters because the audit found that emergency authority is already spread across government. Defra leads on food-supply security, but most relevant legal powers sit with other departments. Defra said existing and planned legislation would be insufficient in a catastrophic event; it could not direct businesses to take actions during an emergency. The group’s advisory status does not fix that gap, and it was not designed to.

Local response adds another line. The NAO found that Local Resilience Forums lacked clear expectations for food disruptions and did not have enough capability and capacity. Most did not plan specifically for food, even where food could be part of a wider risk such as a power outage. A national forum can bring their experience into the room, but a local responder still needs to know who can request goods, who can approve the route and who pays for distribution.

The map has not caught up with the mandate

Food is one of the government’s 13 Critical National Infrastructure sectors. Yet the NAO reported in September that no specific food-supply assets were included in the government’s CNI Knowledge Base. Defra had assessed that no individual asset was sufficiently critical. Work to explore adding food-related infrastructure had begun in late 2025, with an initial phase aimed for the end of 2026.

The government’s CNI Knowledge Base contains no specific food-supply assets. The shared record gives officials no common map of which parts of the system need priority support during a severe disruption. That leaves them without a shared basis for comparing the likely consequences of losing a distribution function, a cold-chain dependency or a local route to households needing support. The 6 October workshop discussed critical dependencies; its public summary contains no asset list or completed vulnerability map.

The planning record has a similar shape. Defra has an overarching playbook, but the NAO found it focused on government structures and processes. Businesses had not helped develop or seen it, and it had not been independently assured. Defra judged a full emergency plan disproportionate to the assessed risk and likelihood, without first stating an explicit risk appetite; it was developing a more basic plan. The audit recommended defining that appetite, setting measures, involving industry in plans and exercises, reviewing legal powers and identifying any food assets that belong in the CNI Knowledge Base.

The Food Preparedness Group changes the participation record. Its first meeting gathered government, industry, local-resilience and community voices. Its terms provide for a year of work, six meetings annually and public summaries of key themes without attribution. All meetings are confidential, with handling rules set for each agenda item; non-sensitive information can be shared. The design creates a channel between useful operational knowledge and the public record while protecting material that should remain restricted.

A common trigger can leave the choice local

The model does not need a central inventory of every crate or a single official directing ordinary commerce. A thinner common layer would be more useful: agreed disruption thresholds, the public bodies that own each decision, the dependencies that move a risk across sectors, the local authority or forum that receives an escalation, and the route by which a business can participate. Each operator can keep its own detailed response and commercial data.

That is where the idea in Heng Lu’s Note 64 is a useful design lens: standardise only the shared facts required for coordination, then leave decisions that do not need a central rule with the people operating the system. In a food emergency, that principle needs a legal edge. Voluntary cooperation can make the route faster, but it cannot substitute for a clear public authority where the state needs to direct action. The public record should say where that authority begins and what event activates it.

The first workshop was a sensible opening because it connected the national supply question to community delivery. Its summary records plans to develop shared work on vulnerabilities, resilience standards, roles and dependencies. The next subgroup meetings were expected in late November or early December; the full group was expected to reconvene in spring 2027. Those dates create a natural sequence of evidence: a vulnerability map, a response plan, then an exercise that records what changed and who owns the remaining actions.

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