26 February 2026

The UK public sector serves millions of meals every day in schools, hospitals and prisons. It should be one of our most powerful tools for food system transformation. 

Yet at our January webinar, Kevin Morgan shared two things that tell you everything about the state of public food in this country. His new book, Serving the Public: The Good Food Revolution in Schools, Hospitals and Prisons, draws on two decades of research into public food systems. Morgan relayed the story of Oldham, a relatively deprived northern borough that once won a Gold Standard Food for Life Award, which is shutting down its school catering entirely. And the barriers to getting good food onto public plates? After 20 years of research, Morgan says they’re pretty much the same.

Quick Take

• A procurement culture built around lowest cost has hollowed out public food. For the past four decades Morgan argues that “low cost has masqueraded as best value” across schools, hospitals and prisons. The consequences for health, sustainability and local food economies have hardly been considered. His book makes the case for values-based procurement that treats the public plate as a genuine lever for food system transformation.
• The schools picture is especially alarming. Oldham, a relatively poor borough that once won a Gold Standard Food for Life Award, is now shutting down its school catering entirely. Academisation and rising costs are driving local authorities across England out of school catering, and Morgan warned the sector could go the way of adult social care. Meanwhile, the Starmer government has opted for free breakfasts rather than the universal free school meals being pioneered in Scotland, Wales and London.
• The public plate can’t be reduced to procurement alone. Morgan pointed to the School Meals Coalition’s conceptual framework as showing how procurement needs to sit within a wider ecosystem of policies, from menu design and food education to sustainable farming and waste reduction. If it’s used as a silver bullet, procurement is being set up to fail.
• What works is deceptively simple, but hard to sustain. As the leader of Oldham council once told Morgan in better days: “Our secrets are simply a great, skilled catering team, and politicians who have our backs.” Places like Bury in Greater Manchester show what’s possible when competence meets political commitment. But these successes remain the exception, too often dependent on individual champions or funding that eventually dries up. 

Deep Dive

Where it all began

Morgan’s research into public food started more than 20 years ago with a small rural development project in Mid-Wales that had a seemingly simple aim: getting local food into a local hospital. The project was, in his words, a total and utter failure. But he spent 18 months working with the Soil Association, Sustain and local partners to understand why. The barriers included procurement regulations that were perceived to block local sourcing, tendering procedures too complex for small suppliers, a catering culture geared towards large contractors to minimise transaction costs, and most strikingly NHS auditing systems that could not account for the health gains of nutritious food.

That last point captures something fundamental about the dysfunction Morgan describes. The NHS is left providing what he calls a “clinical solution to a societal problem” by treating the diet-related diseases that a better public food system could help prevent. The Shelley Report on hospital food, which Morgan highlights in his book, represents a rare attempt to tackle this systemically, pushing for integration between procurement, catering and waste management rather than the celebrity chef-led reviews of the past, which focused on improving the food itself without addressing the system around it.

The barriers haven’t gone away

When asked at the webinar whether the barriers he identified two decades ago had changed, Morgan’s response was unequivocal: pretty much the same. Those who assumed that leaving the EU would free up public procurement have been disappointed because the UK remains bound by World Trade Organization rules that impose similar constraints. 

But Morgan’s deeper point was that EU regulations were always more perception than reality. Countries like Italy and France have used quality markers like organic certification, time from harvest, and typical regional produce as proxies for local sourcing, sending a signal to suppliers without falling foul of the rules. The UK was simply late to recognise these approaches.

Even where social value is now formally part of procurement frameworks, Morgan argued that you still need the skill sets and the political support to do something different. Without both, good practice remains fragile. Innovations succeed at the local level but are never embedded in institutional culture, and national government proves either unable or unwilling to mainstream them. It’s a pattern Morgan has seen repeated across schools, hospitals and prisons over two decades.

Prospects for change

The picture is not uniformly bleak. Scotland and Wales are pioneering universal free school meals for primary schools, with Wales currently the only UK nation to have rolled it out fully. London boroughs are following suit, with Tower Hamlets extending free meals to all children. The Public Sector Catering Alliance, launched in 2024, brought the sector together for the first time and is pushing for dedicated representation in Defra’s food policy discussions, having been repeatedly told in the past that it was “already represented”.

Morgan also pointed to the growing international evidence base, particularly the School Meals Coalition’s work on how procurement fits within a wider ecosystem of food policies. The lesson from this work is that procurement cannot be a silver bullet. It needs to be integrated with support for local production, menu design, food education and waste reduction.

For the UK, Morgan argued, the opportunity lies in connecting the public plate to the prevention agenda that is now central to NHS reform. Good food in public institutions is about nutrition of course, but it’s so much more, too, with the potential to reduce health bills, support local economies and build the kind of food culture that makes healthier choices the norm. Even the economics are straightforward because it is simply cheaper to have good diets and lower health bills. That makes fiscal sense as well as ethical sense.

But translating that logic into durable institutional change requires what Morgan described as the two most important ingredients: professional skill and political commitment. Neither is complicated. Both are remarkably hard to sustain.

What now?

Morgan makes a compelling case that the public plate is one of the most significant and most neglected levers available for food system transformation in the UK. There are tried-and-tested tools and ample evidence for what works, as well as success stories like Bury that show what’s possible. The challenge is making good practice the norm, not the exception, which requires the kind of durable political commitment and institutional investment that has so far proved elusive.

Public procurement connects directly to several strands of AFN’s own Roadmap for Resilience, from sustainable diets to resilient local food economies. If you’re working on public food procurement in schools, hospitals, local authorities or beyond, we’d love to hear what’s working and what isn’t. Get in touch.