Inadequate staffing and insufficient funding are two critical barriers to achieving ongoing and effective implementation of the Food Ladders. These resources ensure the oversight, coordination, and collaboration needed to realise the vision.
Tool 1: This guide from Sustain provides further information about employing a food partnership coordinator.
Changing how we think about food provision takes time, and in our current system, this costs money. Funding represents a significant barrier for many local authorities hoping to use the Food Ladders framework. At a time when council budgets are squeezed, there are still innovative ways you can approach the pursuit of resources needed to implement Food Ladders.
Many councils have funded their food coordinators and services using a variety of sources, including contributions by the council out of health budgets and the household support fund and welfare funding, as well as securing funding and other resources from other anchor organisations and benefactors. Many have worked in University Partnerships to help resource their work to develop food plans. Others have started by local organisations “gifting time” for a coordinator with further funding from the council (for example, Liverpool and Sheffield). On average, council contributions have been about £200K.
When the £20 universal credit was removed we lost £37 million because much of those 20 quids would have been spent in local shops and we only got £7.4 million back to replace it. So with the communities have seen a significant drop in the money’s available. We used some of it to provide additional support through food banks and other sort of areas of provision. Interestingly here, we redirected some of our local welfare provision budget because we had the ability to use household support fund monies. Instead, we redirected some of that support fund in order to create food hubs.
-welfare support Officer
This has taken creative thinking and partnership working to secure the time and resources needed. By working in this way, these places have been able to assure stability in the ways that they develop and implement their food plans. The case study below describes further how one council has gone beyond their existing budgets to find funding to support Food Ladder coordination.
Case Study: The Rothschild Foundation/Buckinghamshire County Council
What additional resource can we put in to help people think beyond their day job?
Grant Manager, The Rothschild Foundation
In Buckinghamshire, a partnership between the County Council and the Rothschild Foundation (RF), a locally-based funder, provided an alternative approach to resourcing the development of food ladders in the area.
The Rothschild Foundation is a grantmaking charitable trust based in Waddesdon, Buckinghamshire. One of the largest funders in the county, the foundation has an established interest in funding food projects, partly due to the history of food production on the Foundation’s estate. The Rothschild Foundation was one of several funders in the county to help distribute funds from Buckinghamshire County Council (BCC) during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Following the publication of data mapping Adult Food insecurity at Local Authority Scale (see also this discussion), Buckinghamshire County Council and the Rothschild Foundation collaborated to develop the Bucks Food Partnership (BFP). The Council saw their role as primarily being one of coordination, joining the dots between different public and VCS organisations in the area, whilst the Foundation could convene and resource the Partnership, supporting participants to shape the project’s direction. First incorporated as a Charitable Incorporated Organisation independent of the council and the foundation, the food partnership initiated a project to build capacity of community food provision in the county. This project was led by a ‘Food Ladders Consultant’, a new role created with RF’s financial support.
The Consultant worked across the county to map the food landscape of Buckinghamshire, using Food Ladders to frame their approach. The consultant engaged local food providers and activity organisers throughout this process, encouraging them to use the Food Ladders model. Having a dedicated role, independent of larger local institutions such as the council, allowed the BFP to identify gaps in the Ladder and opportunities for improvement in the area whilst creating buy-in from various stakeholders across the county.
The consultancy project culminated with a report summarising findings and recommending the next steps for building food ladders in Buckinghamshire. These include creating two new roles, a Project Coordinator and a Communications Officer, to further develop the work of BFP in future. By focusing resources on understanding the bigger picture of community food activity in Buckinghamshire, the partnership between the council and the funder, through the food partnership, generated valuable insight into the food landscape of the county and identified strategic areas for further resources. By creating dedicated roles to do this work, capacity is released, which ensures that day-to-day activity continues without coming at the cost of longer-term planning.
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