Louise Casey, Baroness Casey of Blackstock, has lately been thinking a good deal about freezers. The thought originated with a question from King Charles, last August, when he was still Prince of Wales. The sudden spike in food prices had caused an exponential rise in demand at food banks. It also prompted the future monarch to ask Casey – who, among many other things, is a trustee of his charitable fund – what might be done.
“Freezers!” she said and scrolled down her phone for the numbers for Nisbets, the catering supplier, and for Richard Walker, the managing director of Iceland Foods. Casey had learned from talking to organisers of food banks during the pandemic that one of their biggest frustrations was a lack of refrigeration for surplus fresh and perishable goods. “Ideally,” she told Charles, “we would get a freezer into every [food bank user’s] home and pay for the electricity, but to begin with let’s do it for food banks and community kitchens.” The king’s charitable fund stumped up £1m, and 800 freezers, some on an industrial, blast-chill scale, have now been installed. The night before we met, Casey had been at a Clarence House reception with the monarch, toasting cold storage.
She is telling me this story in the small back office canteen of the Felix Project depot in Poplar, east London. Our lunch is one of 3,500 meals produced on this site every day for some of the thousand community partners that the charity provides for. (In 2022 the Felix Project redistributed 12,000 tonnes of food that would otherwise have been wasted – which it says is the equivalent of 29m meals.) There are three choices – meat, fish or veggie. Casey has gone for the marinated salmon; I’ve got a perfectly spiced lamb curry.
The freezer story is illustrative of the telling fact about Casey. At a time of appalling appalling political inaction, she is a singular example of that old-fashioned ability to get things done. So much so that she sometimes seems to be a one-woman who-you-gonna-call social services. At the beginning of lockdown it was Casey, for example, who, realising the effect the pandemic would have on the homeless, literally banged on doors in Whitehall and Westminster and forced the government to let her quickly find secure beds for 15,000 rough sleepers. She has more than 30 years of such door-banging behind her – initially as outspoken voice for the homeless at the Shelter and St Mungo’s charities, latterly as “tsar” of various social crisis management initiatives under successive governments.
She naturally became involved in the Felix Project, which focuses on redistributing supermarket food surplus in London – and via FareShare beyond the capital – as a result of her campaigning work. She is, she tells me, both a passionate advocate of the inspiring work the charities do, and completely appalled by the necessity for it. Walking through the depot, it’s hard not to agree. The charity – which was set up six years ago by Justin and Jane Byam Shaw, in memory of their son – has become like a soup kitchen on the grandest imaginable scale. Outside, food is arriving all the time in vans and lorries from a network of supermarkets and wholesalers to be unpacked by teams of volunteers – some local people, some on corporate giving days. Some is boxed and bagged for distribution to families, some is redirected to the kitchen – including the 75kg of lamb from which my curry comes – and some goes into floor-to-ceiling warehouse storage, or the new blast freezer.
This is only one end of the story. At the other are those thousands of families who have come to see the Felix Project as a lifeline. Recent statistics suggest that nearly 9 million British adults are struggling to afford to eat every day. The scale of the response is heartwarming, but the need entirely depressing.
Casey sits as a crossbench peer and has, over the years, always expressed a willingness to work with any political party. I wonder if that non-partisan principle is currently being tested to breaking point?
“It is. Absolutely,” she says. “It’s not sustainable any more. I’m 100% clear – and this is the first time I’ve said it out loud – that we need a change of government. This lot are spent. Even if you are a Conservative, you just can’t carry on with this. They are done. Finished.”
She lost any faith in them, she says, at about the time that Jacob Rees-Mogg was pictured lounging on the frontbench in the Commons. “I mean,I’m sorry, but who do these people think they are? You know what government is? It’s the ability to make or break people’s lives. It’s not for their own amusement.”
There was a thread through her work in the previous 20 years. She was asked to lead the “Respect” agenda for the Blair government, which evolved into the “Troubled Families programme” under Cameron’s coalition. She argued that if you could identify the 100,000 or so families with the most serious problems – addiction, abuse, evictions and so on – and precisely target resources at turning them around, you could create multiplier improvements for wider society; less crime, less emergency healthcare, stronger community. Those governments were both actively engaged in those initiatives, she says, though with different ideological motivations. That’s all gone.
“None of that sentiment is even on show currently,” she says. “That’s why I’m 100% behind Keir Starmer. He provides hope. I like his five missions. I like the fact he’s not complacent.”
Having worked close to the frontline of deprivation for so long, doesn’t she ever despair of solutions?
“I feel very strongly,” she says, “that if people have privilege, then they have a responsibility not to despair, but to help find solutions. The harder the problem, the happier I am really.”
Casey worked on a review into the “boy’s club” culture of the Metropolitan police, after the murder of Sarah Everard. Her shaming report was published in the spring, but it’s something of a frustration for her that she has no role in trying to fix the issues of misogyny and homophobia that she identified. “That’s more my cup of tea, really, getting on with things,” she says.
Casey formed that determination early. She grew up in Redruth in Cornwall and in Portsmouth. Her dad was a union rep at the telecoms firm Plessey: “Irish, mild-mannered.” Her mother was more vocal. “When there were arguments at the dinner table she would say: ‘Just remember, when I was born we didn’t even have the vote.’”
She lived to see Casey get an OBE, but not her peerage. “I think the dame thing would have blown her away,” Casey says. It even silenced her. When a call from Downing Street came up on her phone, her first thought was, “Oh Christ, what’s gone wrong now – because no one ever rings me just to say hello.” It was Mark Sedwill from the Cabinet Office. He said: “Louise, we feel strongly that we want you to be somewhere that you can be fully independent and always speak without fear or favour. And that is the House of Lords.” “I didn’t know what to say,” she recalls. Sedwill laughed: “Have I shut you up?” “I was crying, actually,” she says.
She is still getting her bearings on the red benches, but no doubt she will find plenty to do. There have been murmurings that she might be asked to lead a new Beveridge report for any incoming Starmer government. What, I wonder, would she prioritise, given a free rein?
“I’d work out a plan to end hunger. I would reform the rental sector to end homelessness. I would target resources at violence against women and children. And, of course, at the elderly care system and hospitals. I think governments have to tackle the big problems straight away, start from there…”
We’ve finished our excellent lunches by now, and the volunteers at the Felix Project are sitting down for theirs. I note that whenever I’ve asked Casey a personal question, she has talked about wider issues, rather than herself: why is that?
“I don’t want to be an interesting person,” she says. “I want to be somebody that does interesting work. I think we’re getting a little bit American with everybody telling their story all the time – ‘are you doing podcasts?’ I think we desperately need people who do things, not talk about doing them.” She smiles. “Remember to mention the freezers!” she says.
I’ll see what I can do, I say.
For more information on the Felix Project go to thefelixproject.org
