WRAP – the Waste Resources and Action Programme, which is responsible for the Love Food Hate Waste campaign – yesterday published new research showing that food waste in Britain had fallen by 13 per cent since 2006-07. The actual decrease, it said, was from 8.3 million tonnes to 7.2 million tonnes a year. The report was widely covered in the media.

Any reduction in waste is welcome. But is this fall significant, and are WRAP’s efforts responsible for it, as it suggests? That depends on what you make of the figures.

Its original report, The Food We Waste, published in 2008 and about which I raised some questions in June 2009, estimated that annual wastage of food in the UK was 6.7 million tonnes a year. If that figure was right, then food waste has actually risen rather than fallen in the intervening years.

That report, now curiously difficult to find on WRAP’s website which is why I have provided an indirect link through a BBC story, formed the basis of the claim made in an advertising campaign that Britain wastes a third of the food it buys. The claim rested on two assumptions, first that items such as bones, apple cores and potato peelings should be included in the total – they are waste, certainly, but should we feel any guilt in throwing them away? The second was that waste be measured by value rather than by weight.

Some food waste really is unavoidable, even in the best-run kitchen. If you subtract that, total “avoidable” food waste in the 2008 report came down to just over 4 million tonnes a year, or 18.4 per cent by weight of food bought. Not a third, then, but less than a fifth.

The comparable figure in the new report, published yesterday, is 4.4 million tonnes. So, just like total waste, it looks as if avoidable waste has increased rather than diminished since the baseline was established.

What’s going on? On the fact of it, WRAP appears to be claiming that total food waste has increased from 6.7 to 8.3 million tonnes, then fallen to 7.2 million tonnes, all in the course of a few years. The answer is that in 2009 it produced another report, Household Food and Drink Waste in the UK, which upped the total by increasing the estimate of the food and drink that goes down the drain, and cannot easily be measured.

The estimate was tripled, from 0.6 million tonnes to 1.8 million tonnes a year, on the basis of research involving 300 participants who weighed or measured waste they were about to put down the sink.

The amount of waste that was fed to animals or put on a home compost heap was also increased, from 0.2 to 0.7 million tonnes a year. Why this should be regarded as waste, especially by a group such as WRAP whose website is filled with articles and advice about composting, is not clear. Waste fed to animals or composted is not waste at all, but a resource being put to a good purpose.

Anyway, this revision gave WRAP its baseline figure of 8.3 million tonnes, which it applied retrospectively to 2006-07, and against which it now claims progress.   

Yesterday’s report finds that waste collected by local authorities fell by 20 per cent since then, from 5.8 to 4.6 mt. Despite this decline, WRAP marginally increases the amount it believes went down the drain (from 1.8 to 1.9 mt) and the amount composted or fed to animals (from 0.69 to 0.70 mt).

Since 2006 the total purchases of food and drink, in and out of the home, have fallen by 9.4 per cent. Total waste, on WRAP’s figures, has fallen by 13 per cent, and avoidable waste by 10 per cent. So it looks as if the great majority of any decline that has taken place is the result of there simply being less to throw away.

There has been an increase in the proportion of people claiming in WRAP’s surveys that they throw away “none” or “hardly any” of the food they buy. But almost all this increase occurred before WRAP started campaigning, so it cannot claim to have changed behaviour.

It is very easy, then, to agree with the report’s conclusion: “It is unlikely that all of the reduction in food waste is the result of the work of WRAP, its partners and others active in the field of food waste reduction.”

Unfortunately, it then goes on to add: “However, the evidence presented in this report suggests that WRAP – and its work with its partners – has been a key influence on food waste levels”. That sounds like wishful thinking.

WRAP’s budget in 2010-11 was £100 million, about half of it from DEFRA and with contributions from the government and assemblies in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. It faced a big cut in 2011-12, but DEFRA is still providing nearly £35 million. Money well spent, or possibly wasted?