Beachside bites and big ideas: shaping UK food policy in Bridlington

‘What food subsidies or taxes should the UK government use to make healthier and sustainable foods more affordable?’ This was the question put to local people who attended a deliberative forum in Bridlington, East Yorkshire, over (a significantly cooler) two days in October 2023. The event was hosted by the COPPER research team, including Pete Scarborough, Hannah Forde, Jess Renzella and Lucy Yates.

Funded by the NIHR, the COPPER project aims to work with the public and policymakers to co-design food subsidy and tax scenarios. These scenarios will then be modelled to estimate their impact on health, health inequalities, household economics, macroeconomics and the environment. The project is a collaboration between the Nuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), University of Exeter, University of Reading and the Food Foundation.

The idea of the deliberative forum was to bring together people from the local community to review evidence and come to a group decision on an issue that’s important to society: the food subsidies and taxes that could make healthier and sustainable food more affordable in the UK.

The top four policies that the attendees of the Bridlington deliberative forum voted for were a tax on high carbon foods, a tax on unhealthy foods, a tax on red and processed meat and a subsidy on locally produced food.

We had thoughtful input from the participants in the deliberative forum and the COPPER team wanted to find a way to return to Bridlington and share the results of the deliberative forum more widely with the local community. This would also allow us to capture how far the wider community favoured the same food values and to amplify these voices in reporting back to the NIHR and policymakers.

We were lucky to be awarded extra funding for this engagement activity from the University of Oxford Medical Sciences Division’s Participatory Research Seed Fund.

Views from the wider community 

When we found out that there was a specialist food market in Bridlington, we thought this would be a great venue for our community engagement. We wanted to offer passers-by a tasty bite to eat in order to tempt them to stop and talk about what they value when it comes to food so we ordered healthy and sustainable snacks from a local caterer.

The snack wrappers also doubled as voting papers. We labelled bins with the food system values selected at the deliberative forum and asked people to drop their wrapper into the bin labelled with the valve most important to them.

To collect a wider range of ideas and input from the community, we also provided comments cards with space to write or draw to allow freestyle input responding to the prompt, ‘What do you value most when you think about food?’.

We also had a local photographer to capture images of the day. In addition to reaching the people of Bridlington, our original aim was that we could use these images, alongside compelling graphic design and a full write-up, to create an attractive case study for display in the lobby of the NDPCHS building in the autumn 2024. This would then act as a celebration of public engagement with research within the department.

What we learnt

After we’d counted all the wrappers, we tallied up the votes for which food system value people thought was most important. We had 22 votes for ‘good for the environment’, 29 votes for ‘fair food’, 31 votes for ‘local food’ and 64 votes for ‘the importance of healthy food’. This also meant we’d engaged with at least 146 people, despite stiff competition for attention from the nearby beach and seaside attractions.

The comments cards gave us a wide range of views. Many echoed the values suggested by the voting activity but the cards often listed more than one value. As we often found in conversation, people thought more than one value or even all of the values were equally important, as one local resident who wrote, ‘Good value for healthy meals’.

Other values which came up were considerations around organic food, animal welfare, allergies and having a healthy relationship with food and portion sizes. The comments cards also captured some more specific recommendations, such as a request for supermarkets to do smaller bags of fruit and veg, the teaching of cooking skills in schools, and the need for more affordable vegan food. One of the younger visitors to the stand also highlighted the need for ‘more treats’!

We had some amazing conversations with people in Bridlington. One of the most memorable was with a group of young mums who stopped to talk to us about fairness, explaining that they felt it wasn’t okay that they had to get their meals from food banks while others were shopping at M&S and they even popped back to ask us what we were going to do with what we learnt. Good question…

What we’ll do next

We will include what we learnt in Bridlington in our reporting back on the overall COPPER project to DHSC, DEFRA and the Treasury. We also hope to run a similar public engagement event in Glasgow where we also held a deliberative forum.

Using the lively photographs, we also plan to turn a case study of the event into an engaging display to boost the profile of public engagement within NDPCHS. If you’re in the department, watch out for this in the main building in the autumn as it will also incorporate an interactive voting activity!