Draft, evolving. This is the short options paper Camden asked for: a small number of high-leverage interventions Camden could explore in partnership with key stakeholders, selected from the full catalogue on Where's the Energy? It now also carries the three simple indicators Camden asked for separately, tracked through data already being captured, for knowing whether any of it is working. As energy moves, or new interventions surface, this list changes with it — it is not a final decision, and nothing here is funded or agreed by being listed.
Working draft, October 2026Camden's Food Partnership raised more than forty ideas across the Future Food Dinner and Workshop. Most are real and worth holding. Only a handful already have a named person or organisation ready to move. This page is those — picked for momentum, not importance, so Camden can start a real conversation with a real partner rather than another round of ideas. It ends with the three indicators that tell Camden and DML whether any of it is actually moving the mission.
Every idea on Where's the Energy? was tested against one question: did someone at the table already show up with real energy for it — a name, a business reason, a thing they're already doing — or is it still an idea waiting for an owner? The options below passed that test. Everything else is still live, just not yet ready for a partnership conversation; it stays on the full catalogue, not off the agenda. Options 10 and 11 are the exceptions: neither comes from the Dinner and Workshop catalogue. 10 comes from what's actually been said in the Food Partnership's own steering meetings since, and 11 from Camden's own 2026 sensemaking workshop — both earning a place here on the same basis, real, repeated energy, not yet an owner.
Add food formally to Camden's emergency response, alongside the police, hospital, ambulance and fire services already covered by the Borough Resilience Forum — before national policy requires it.
The UK government is reportedly preparing a major food resilience commitment, expected within the coming weeks, focused on growing more food domestically and protecting supply chains from climate and geopolitical shocks. It follows a National Audit Office finding that Defra has done too little in recent years to help households, businesses and communities build resilience, and sits alongside a wider Cabinet Office campaign encouraging households to hold a basic emergency kit. Food supply is already treated as one of the UK's 13 Critical National Infrastructure sectors. A borough that has already set up its own resilience committee is ahead of guidance that looks to be arriving anyway, not reacting to it.
As of this page's last update, the announcement itself hadn't formally landed, this is trade press and parliamentary reporting on what's coming, not a confirmed policy. Worth checking gov.uk directly before citing it as settled.
A joint public/private Camden charter set deliberately beyond existing certifications — Food for Life Served Here's gold standard only requires around 15% organic.
A real-time way to connect community projects with contractors and developers already on site, so in-kind support doesn't disappear once a contract ends.
The single biggest tangible idea from the workshop — a hub-and-spoke model anchored at Regis Road, with composting and anaerobic digestion planned alongside it.
Scale an existing "one conversation instead of a hundred" relationship model into a repeatable, institutional capability rather than one person's own contacts.
Further explore WinVal's mesh architecture — the Liquid Farm Capacitor model already referenced across this portfolio — to match farm supply to demand aggregated across Camden and other aligned London boroughs, putting real purchasing power in councils' hands rather than leaving it scattered borough by borough.
Pharmacies reframed as neighbourhood performance-and-nutrition nodes — fresh food, dietary advice and community links, framed around aspiration rather than illness.
Corner shops, convenience stores and small independent retailers sit outside most food-partnership conversations, despite being where many residents actually buy food.
A recognisable, minimum-standards toolkit so anyone can start a food co-op, and residents can recognise one the way they'd recognise a supermarket or the Underground.
A year into regular meetings, the Camden Food Partnership has a real rhythm and has gotten genuinely good at sharing information between members. What it hasn't yet done is unlock collective action at any meaningful scale. DML has real experience moving groups like this from sharing information into an action-oriented ecosystem: giving members the capacities and the freedom to actually move, not another agenda item. The live food system map could do real work here, letting the group state what it intends to do, put soft accountability on when, and widen who's actively participating well beyond the current core. A concrete version of that gap: a family identified as vulnerable through one project, say a school dinner club, has no shared way of also being connected to budget-cooking mentors or a veg box's solidarity bags. Three teams, one household, no shared visibility between them.
Camden has 32 sheltered housing schemes and 5 extra care services, most with a working kitchen that barely gets used beyond contracted, off-site-cooked meals reheated on site. As the borough's population ages, that's a bigger and faster-growing underused kitchen footprint than school kitchens, with a built-in reason to open it up that goes beyond food: tackling isolation and food quality at once, not capacity alone. The version raised directly was handing one of these kitchens to an outside community kitchen operator, making it a hub for the wider neighbourhood, not just residents. The Camden-specific case for doing it is as much about intergenerational connection as nutrition: older residents whose own families have been priced out of the borough meeting younger residents who've lost that same generation locally, over food, in a space neither would otherwise have reason to share.
Tim Lang's National Preparedness Commission review recommended every local authority add a food resilience committee to its emergency planning; the Cabinet Office's call for views on making that statutory has now closed. Whichever way that lands nationally, a borough that has already set one up has done the work before being told to — and option 01 above already has a named person ready to carry it.
Not eleven indicators for eleven options, and not a measurement framework alongside Cornerstone Indicators's own methodology. Three simple numbers for the mission itself — each one readable off data Camden or DML is already capturing, and each one, below, linked back to the specific options most likely to move it.
The gap between Camden's most and least deprived wards on a single measure Camden already collects — child healthy weight, via the National Child Measurement Programme inside the Healthy Weight Acceleration Plan. Success is the gap narrowing, not the borough-wide average moving while the gap stays the same.
The share of food moving through Camden's own hubs, public kitchens and short supply chains — already tracked by the Hubs & Markets Working Group and the Supply Map — measured against the mainstream, global-supply-chain baseline the Supply Map maps out. Success is that share growing.
How far a modelled supply shock travels into Camden before local capacity — hubs, reserves, producer relationships — absorbs it, using the Nutrition Cascade Model already built for exactly this. Success is shocks reaching fewer households, or taking longer to bite. Camden doesn't have to look far for a live example: Kentish Town Veg Box's transport costs have doubled this year, forcing cuts to staff hours, exactly the kind of shock this indicator exists to catch.
None of the eleven options above are free of a genuine trade-off. Naming them here is the point — these are Camden's decisions to make deliberately, not gaps this page is hiding.
This page is deliberately a shortlist, not a plan. The next job — Camden's, not DML's alone — is testing each option's feasibility, deciding which ones Camden or a partner can run locally versus which need the wider alliance, and working out what resources and partners each one actually needs. The three indicators above are how both sides will know, once that work starts, whether it's actually landing. That filtering is phase two's job; this page is what phase two filters.
Every idea raised at the Dinner and Workshop, not just the ones with a named owner.
The shared framework these options sit inside.
Where the hub option (04) gets tested against real boroughs, leases and funding gaps.
The open-source methodology behind the three indicators above, for Camden to own and adapt directly.
