It is essential that the Government sets buying standards for public procurement of food in order to achieve value for money and ensure that high quality food, produced to high standards, is served by public bodies. However, standards are only effective if they are followed, and currently we do not have a clear picture of how frequently and effectively the Government Buying Standards for Food and Catering (GBSF) are being followed by public bodies. There is no coherent system for monitoring compliance where public bodies are mandated to follow the GBSF. This means that food supply chains cannot normalise around one set of baseline standards. A responsibility for monitoring compliance should be emphasised to or placed on existing inspection bodies, such as Ofsted (for schools) and the Care Quality Commission (for NHS Trusts), rather than creating new structures for inspection. These data should be reported to Government. Where such inspection bodies do not exist, Defra must gather data on compliance with the GBSF and the Balanced Scorecard through annual surveys, as it already does for government departments. It should publish the results of these surveys and name Departments that are not meeting the standards or fail to respond adequately to surveys.