Before the UK had a national health service, it had a national restaurant service… is it time for the two to work side by side?
2nd Jun, 2025
Nourish Scotland is the organisation championing ‘public diners’ as a new policy proposal for the UK. They have been developing the concept with people across the country for the past three years. Their 2024 report sets out the policy proposal for public diners. Read here.
Imagine a full-on, sit-down dinner at Greggs prices without all the Greggs guilt. A place you could afford to eat at more than once a week for the rest of your life and not have to worry about it hurting your health in any way. Full flavour, full trust establishments across the country.
Public diners are restaurants that the state supports (with actual funding or amenities/rent) so that the quality of meals is always high and the price for the customer is always low. They are public infrastructure that sit alongside public healthcare, public education, public parks, public wifi, and set a better, more equal baseline for how we do food.
There are many countries across the world that operate their own brand of public diners. From the famous milk bars (bary mleczne) in Poland, through to public/city restaurants (halk lokantasi) in Turkey. You might be surprised to hear the UK used to have its own brand of public diners.
The UK used to subsidise a chain of over 2000 restaurants
From 1940 right through to the early 70s, the UK government subsidised a chain of restaurants, first known as ‘British Restaurants’ during the Second World War and then enshrined in law as ‘Civic Restaurants’ after the war . By 1944, there were more than 2,000 across the UK – more than the number of Greggs there are today.
These state-supported restaurants were primarily organised to meet a public health need. The health of the population was worsening right at the time that people and society needed to be decisively healthy and strong. The restaurant service was an efficient way for the government to make sure people were able to have a decent meal everyday. The benefits of this went beyond stronger bodies – they created stronger neighbourhoods on all fronts.
As one diner put it: They have to wait for a war to start places like these. Why can’t they think of it in peacetime?
The restaurants outlived the war. The last one was sold off in the early 70s when support for the scheme fell out of favour with the Conservative Government. Their story is buried beneath the success of other food policies at the time, such as rationing, and the general, bigger story of World War II. It’s definitely time to dig it out and reimagine public diners for the UK today.
Public diners today: a bold preventative public health intervention
It’s been a decade since poor diets overtook smoking as the leading cause of preventable death in Britain. In financial terms, Food Farming and Countryside Commission (FFCC) reporting estimates that poor diets cost the UK £268 billion each year – that’s almost the entire annual UK healthcare spend. Beyond the financial cost, poor diets are shaving years off healthy life expectancies and continuing to widen the health inequalities across the country.
Still, it remains cheaper and easier (in terms of access) to eat unhealthy, time and energy to cook is being squeezed by working schedules, some towns have 5 grocers, others have none. Policies trying to educate individuals about their food choices fail to affect public health because they don’t remove the structural barriers to eating well – public diners can. They will be new neighbourhood places where quality meals are no longer out of reach.
Public diners will remove the barriers to accessing quality food – cost, time, proximity, company – making eating well easier and inevitably having a positive impact on the health of neighbourhoods across the UK.
Spotlight: ‘Cooking from scratch on mass’ with Comedores Comunitarios (Community Kitchens) in Mexico
Comedores Comunitarios are government-supported, locally run community kitchens in Mexico that have been providing low-priced meals to the general public since 2013. The federal government sets standards (usually around nutrition and employment) and provides funding to local governments who either run the kitchens themselves or outsource the running to private/community operators, often to women’s associations.
Ingredients such as grains, legumes, vegetables, oil, and protein sources (e.g. eggs, chicken, sometimes dairy) are regularly subsidised or delivered by the government, incentivising the cooking of nutritionally balanced meals. At the same time, kitchen fittings and equipment are made available to operators, enabling large scale preparation of meals. Together, these support mechanisms mean nutritious, cooked-from-scratch meals have been made available and affordable to large amounts of the population – more than 500,000 people daily. From a public health perspective, this ‘cooked from scratch on mass’ effect almost instantly reduced undernourishment and over time has helped improve diets.
Public diners are an investment in better diets that could help save the money currently spent on treatment of bad diets and, more importantly, improve and help equalise quality of life for people across the country. They represent a bold, preventative approach to public health – one that will save us from more costly issues down the line. The best time for public diners was 70 years ago, the next best time is now.