In tough economic times it’s not surprising that thoughts turn to the business climate. Top 20 judge and consultant Vic Laws kicked off the discussion by wondering if a government-based collective agreement on public sector procurement would offer improved buying power.
Ringo Francis, chief executive of sponsor Zenith Hygiene Group, said that from a supplier point of view he feared a collective approach would be unlikely so long as individual sectors had jobs to protect. “Human nature is self-preservation,” he said, pointing out that the high level of bureaucracy involved made dealing with central government difficult.
Moving on, Simon Cox, managing director at ISS Facility Services, said: “We're facing huge pressure in healthcare from trusts and the Department of Health to drive costs down. We're faced with significant cost approval programmes and that's leading to a reduction in the types of meals that are being offered. So we're seeing, perhaps, the evening meal change to a soup and sandwich type offer.”
He felt there was no ‘joined up approach’ in healthcare, particularly when looking at diet allied with food supplements. He believed good food could mitigate the need for a lot of expensive supplements and provide a more cost-effective meal service to patients.
Janice Gillan, chair of the Hospital Caterers’ Association (HCA), was concerned about a lack of funding consistency in hospitals that saw some caterers working with a daily budget per patient of £2.50, while others might have £7.
On the issue of procurement she said the national contract in Scotland compelled public sector buyers to use Scottish suppliers.
Julie Barker of the University Caterers Organisation (TUCO) argued that new EU procurement legislation had added obstructive bureaucracy and stated that TUCO’s procurement wing could purchase for higher and further education sectors as well as local authority schools.
“Moves toward local and sustainable procurement could make collective purchasing difficult for some commodities, although for product lines like baked beans it could work,” she said.
Paddy Howden, representing Government Procurement Services (GPS), said steps were being taken to simplify catering framework agreements with the aim of opening them up to more bidders.
“We're hoping to reduce the red tape and the number of questions that we ask and streamline them to be more appropriate questions that fit the market places that we're going out to compete in,” he said.
Howden added that he was concerned about public sector fragmentation and that an approach used by the Ministry of Defence (MoD), for example, would not necessarily be appropriate for the health or education sectors. Despite that, GPS was using the skills and expertise of people in different sectors to help pull them all together.
However, Howden warned: “It's going to take a big shift in mindset at local levels so that they use our framework agreements rather than trying to compete against them.
“We put a framework in place and then a local organisation will try and benchmark against it to try and shave another 1-2%, so it makes it difficult for you to put your best bid forward for a national deal when you know there's that level of margin that the customer's going to ask you for.”
Charlotte Henderson of the Waste & Resources Action Programme pointed out the true cost of food waste to caterers was not just in the binning of food that could be eaten, but that with charges for its removal they were paying twice.
“No business can afford to be throwing away that amount of food,” she said. “We’ve got figures coming out next year on contract catering that show hundreds of thousands of tons of food that could have been eaten is being thrown away by contract caterers in the UK.
“We're drawing that together with our profit sector research and it will show that there's millions and millions of pounds that could be saved if people look at doing things differently.”
Henderson said it was about giving customers the right food that they will eat, portion sizes, and storage and planning.
David Russell of the Russell Partnership, which produced the landmark Food Vision document for the London Olympics, said he advocated self help on issues like economics.
“We want people asking what they can do to improve a situation, rather than having change foisted on them,” he explained. “Technology is one way of creating efficiency, which is something I have witnessed in several European countries.”
He added that getting better prices did not always mean going with larger scale options and that smaller producers could also provide good value for money.
“It's right to create pressure to bring cost savings down because of economies; also diseconomies do apply quite regularly in food,” he said. “Therefore introducing the smaller supplier – often the person that's got greater technology – could be very helpful for us in allowing the introduction of strategic alliances to the arrangement.
“So I see the principle of self-help as really fundamental to us getting out into the industry and helping ourselves to be able to make the changes happen.”
Russell pointed to work during London 2012 and the partnership between the London Organising Committee of the Olympic and Paralympic Games (LOCOG) and Sustain, pointing out that their website contained information about all kinds of partnerships and ways of working in order to create a sustainable Olympics, and that the information could be especially important to smaller caterers.
“Much of the work will be replicated in Soche, Russia, for the Winter Olympics,” he said. “We should all be very proud of the fact that the UK has taken a lot of initiative and change that is now going to have an impact on the rest of the world.”
Hospitality training was the next topic. Geoff Booth, chief executive of the Professional Association for Catering Education and assistant principal at the School of Hospitality in Westminster Kingsway College, said accessible funding for apprenticeship was encouraging young people into hospitality.
However, he argued that it was hard to recruit from schools, which were still very grounded in A-levels and directing young people towards university. He said catering educators were working with different organisations to highlight hospitality as a career and to signpost routes into the industry.
“The key message is to get to young people to show them there are still jobs in our industry, there's a career structure and we've got various means of training them,” Booth said.
“The downside is somebody's got to give them an apprentice job, pay them money and take a risk on somebody that doesn't have the skills yet.
“So we in the education sector would advocate that employers think about a pre-apprentice course for school leavers so that they come into the industry with some skills, so they're not launched into an industry with no skills and are bound to fail and leave us. We want to retain them in our sector.”
David Foskett, Associate Dean at the University of West London School of Tourism, Hospitality and Leisure, said that the measure of success in further education was always in A-levels and that awareness of other qualifications like BTEC was low, as was hospitality as an industry.
“We don't celebrate apprenticeships enough, certainly not through the media, so the whole system is flawed,” he said. “We have a system of education that really doesn't underpin our economy.”
Foskett said teachers needed to be educated about the business possibilities of hospitality and not see it simply as waiting tables or working in hotels for low pay and long hours. He warned, though, that this meant fighting against a system that wanted to keep students in the classroom.
“We have to do a lot of marketing to get the message across that we have jobs in this industry and a lot of opportunity,” he said. “It's also a great industry for social mobility, an issue the government is always concerned about.
“You can start as a pot washer and become a general manager with the right qualifications. So I think we have a good story to tell, but it's getting it out there.”
Vic Laws pointed out: “This is what the Hospitality Guild has started to do. For the first time ever, the government has given £1.5m to promote careers in the industry and get a collective voice together.
“The guild is backed by McDonald’s, which has given Hospitality House to the industry rent-free for seven years. Compass has just put £50,000 in and Heineken has put money in as well. So I think we are getting a voice together, which we've never had in the past.”
But to succeed the venture needed the support of those around the table.
Geoff Booth noted a new trend in which the high cost of degree courses was bringing more people to hospitality industry open days. In 2012, PACE members had reported double the numbers showing interest compared with the previous year.
Bill Kennedy of Scottish school catering organisation ASSIST mentioned the Northern Ireland initiative Hospitality Matters, which took people from different sectors of the industry and promoted the various businesses to secondary schools.
He said the tourist board had been keen to create a skilled workforce, but that the initiative had stalled when the funding ended.
Chair of the Local Authority Caterers’ Association (LACA) Anne Bull said there was an issue with NVQs because they left potential employers unsure of the skill set that employees were arriving with, which meant that employees who appeared to be qualified often had to be retrained from scratch.
She mentioned Welsh initiatives that encouraged the catering and hospitality industry to work directly with colleges. David Foskett agreed it was important for colleges to partner with industry.
Geoff Booth said that Westminster Kingsway was using industry partners for work placements and also on assessments of final practical exams, but that useful ideas such as these were being introduced at a time when funding for courses has been reduced by 50%, cutting the number of hours training colleges can offer.
“Budget cuts combined with food cost inflation mean the good efforts of colleges are being undermined by the economic situation,” he said.
There was general agreement among the top 20 that they would like to see a return to City & Guilds qualifications, with several voicing concern that hospitality training in the UK was not competitive compared with that available in Europe.
Discussion then moved on to issues around malnutrition in the UK. Cost Sector Catering editor David Foad said that three million people were estimated to suffer from or be at risk of malnutrition, and that the cost to the NHS of treating them was estimated to be £13bn.
Derek Johnson, representing the National Association of Care Catering (NACC), agreed the figures were correct but said they were often overshadowed by headlines about obesity.
He said that people – even within the health service – had been slow to recognise the link between nutrition and good health, and that now that the Care Quality Commission was checking on nutrition in care catering, some services were playing catch up.
“This is all connected to our aging population and that is why we are looking at providing nutrition training to address the current gap in knowledge in the care sector workforce,” he said.
Since awareness of malnutrition was low, the NACC had teamed up with the Hospital Caterers Association to organise a Nutrition Day to be held on 20 March in order to highlight the issue. He added that, to a lesser degree, there was malnutrition among families on very low incomes, who often had poor nutritional understanding.
The HCA’s Janice Gillan said malnutrition among the elderly could be hard to reverse, especially over the course of a short hospital stay.
“We've been very supportive of the mantra of food being the simplest form of medicine and trying to get that message through,” she explained. “It's about initiatives such as protected mealtimes in hospitals and you've got to explain that it means patients can eat their meals without any disruptions.
“Just simple things like the doctor not doing their rounds at that point, because patients would rather see the doctor than eat their tea. A food trolley arriving on a ward is the last thing a nurse wants to see because it’s disruption to their day, and if they've got protected mealtimes it means they can't get away for a tea break themselves, so food is like a bad word.”
“It’s raising the profile of the importance of food, but we've got a long way to go,” she said, adding that she was concerned that catering was seen as a soft service, despite its valuable role as ‘food is medicine’, and was therefore a target for cuts.
Paul O’Brien of the Association for Public Sector Excellence reminded everyone that in 2013 local authorities would be taking responsibility for public health and that caterers should be approaching health and wellbeing boards to secure funding.
“However, there will be strong competition as they will have priorities across the spectrum from sexual health to physical activity, diabetes and obesity.
“Caterers will need to convince people that the area that you're interested in deserves to get funded because it'll make a significant contribution to public health in the future – and that's going to be a battle.”
David Foskett said that at the University of West London a lot of work was being done in the area of public health.
“One of the biggest crises in this society is the link between diet, health and nutrition, and food related illnesses,” he said. “In our research we're looking at what office workers eat at lunchtime and monitoring their sickness record. One hospital consultant said to me that in his hospital four out of ten patients are there because of poor diet.
“And at the Royal Marsden, Dr Clare Shaw has isolated that a third of all cancers are caused by poor diet.”
Foskett said that his final-year School of Tourism, Hospitality and Leisure students were looking at family diets and uncovered found large-scale ignorance concerning food and its correlation with health.
Sue Harrison, Top 20 judge and director of catering at the House of Commons, said she believed workplace caterers were increasingly educating their customers about food.
“But the worst-off families are having to choose between eating and heating, and because they have little food understanding they do not realise that cooking from scratch can be cheaper, so they are buying junk food instead.
“This country has lost touch with its cooking and its food heritage,” she said, but added that there were signs that people wanted to grow their own food and learn how to prepare and cook it – provided they had the time to do so.
Cost Sector Catering managing director Andrew Archer said some of the discussions at the recent launch of the PS100 report into health and nutrition in the public sector acknowledged much of what had been discussed at the table.
“I fear there is a danger of fragmentation, with work being done by individual sectors when what is needed is a single message that the entire industry can back and drive home,” he stated.
Paul O’Brien agreed: “It needs a coordinated, multifaceted strategy that continues to be pushed and supported. It's got to be something that overarches all these individual initiatives that everybody's doing; a simple message about the economy, the environment, health, wellbeing, and the role that food plays in all of that.
“It's something that everybody's got to agree to and those two or three simple messages have got to be consistently pushed if we want to make any impact on society.”
Public sector catering top 20
Cost Sector Catering’s top 20 leaders and opinion formers for 2013 are:
Geoff Booth, CEO of Professional Association of Catering Education (PACE)
Karen Oliver, chair of National Association of Care Catering (NACC)
Julie Barker, MD of the University Caterers Organisation (TUCO)
Anne Bull, chair of Local Authority Caterers’ Association (LACA)
Janice Gillan, chair of Hospital Caterers’ Association (HCA)
Owen Sidaway, head of catering services, Offender Employment Skills & Services, National Offender Management Service (NOMS)
David Shields, MD of Government Procurement Service (GPS)
Andy Killey, head of Defence Fuel and Food Services
Bill Kennedy, chair of Scottish school caterers association (ASSIST)
*John Vincent, Leon co-founder, School Meals Action Plan
*Henry Dimbleby, Leon co-founder, School Meals Action Plan
David Bentley, chair of FCSI UK & Ireland
Paul O’Brien, CEO of Association for Public Sector Excellence (APSE)
Dame Dianne Jeffries, chair of Age UK and head of Malnutrition Task Force
Chris Moore, CEO of the Clink Charity
David Foskett, Associate Dean of School of Tourism, Hospitality and Leisure, University of West London
Liz Goodwin, CEO of Waste & Resources Action Programme (WRAP)
Darren Byford, business development director, Pro5 buying consortium
Helen Davidson, head of British Dietetic Association (BDA)
Simon Cox, MD ISS Facility Services
David Russell, consultant, LOCOG member, Olympic legacy
* Joint entrants