Birmingham Food System Strategy Consultation

Overview

The Birmingham Food System Strategy: Creating a Bolder, Healthier and More Sustainable Food City, sets out a city-wide approach to enable regenerative change across the food system and its impact on the lives of Birmingham citizens.

Through this consultation we are asking you, Birmingham’s citizens, strategic partners, and key agencies (including current service providers), to give your views on our approach and shape the strategy to meet the needs of our city.

The draft Birmingham Food System Strategy details our approach and is available to view on BeHeard. The Birmingham Food System Strategy is the city’s ambitious eight-year approach to creating a bold, sustainable, healthy and thriving food system (2022-2030). The strategy’s vision is to create a bold, fair, sustainable and prosperous food system and economy, where food choices are nutritious, affordable and desirable so all citizens can achieve their potential for a happy, healthy life.

The draft Birmingham Food System Strategy has been developed by the Food System Team, in collaboration with the Creating a Healthy Food City Forum, stakeholder groups, citizens, the Food Foundation, and best practice from international partnerships such as the Milan Urban Food Policy Pact. It has also been informed by research and insights on Birmingham’s food system and the factors that shape people’s food choices through projects such as the Birmingham Food Survey, Birmingham Seldom Heard Food Voices, and Birmingham Food Conversations.

The Creating a Healthy Food City Forum, a subforum of the Health and Wellbeing Board, will have strategic oversight of the Birmingham Food System Strategy. The Birmingham Food System Strategy marks the beginning of our Birmingham Food Revolution. The strategy is owned by the city and is driven by every citizen, organisation, and business in Birmingham collectively levering change, innovation, and development to create a future food system that every citizen is proud to be part of.

This strategy is the outcome of three years of collaboration with partners and citizens; with the key aim of creating a whole system strategy that demonstrates what we need to enable radical change locally and shape a food system for all. The Birmingham Food System strategy is based on a series of workstreams across people and communities, the life course, the city, and different settings (the Big Bold City approach. The strategy is underpinned by 3 key principles: collaborate (strengthen partnerships and build on existing good practice), empower (remove barriers and facilitate solutions) and equalise (focus actions where they are needed most to reduce inequalities).

Changing the food system cannot be achieved by the council alone and will involve agency from a range of organisations and individuals across a variety of settings. We want to strengthen engagement and co-production through consulting on the draft document.