'It's scandalous': FSA under fire for recruiting big food

Less than four years after Horsegate the FSA has announced plans for the most controversial food safety shakeup since it was launched at the turn of the millennium.

Last week The Grocer exclusively revealed that the FSA plans to axe the nation’s “outdated” food safety regime and replace it with a more agile system, featuring a much bigger role for major retailers and food operators.

The system, which it plans to launch as soon as 2019/20, will create bespoke food safety assurance systems for the top 20-30 “super food businesses”, freeing it up to focus on smaller “rogue” operators.

And Tesco, which found itself at the heart of the Horsegate scandal, is playing a lead role, becoming the first retailer to trial the new approach.

But critics have already emerged, claiming the new strategy is selling out to big business and destroying the FSA’s independence.

So, how exactly does the FSA envisage its new system working? Is it handing over the food safety reins to Tesco et al? Or is there method in its apparent madness?

Quasi-regulation?

Starting at Christmas, Tesco and the pub giant Mitchells & Butlers will launch the first of a series of three-month trials that will see how the FSA can get food companies to audit their supply chain safety in what will effectively be a quasi self-regulatory system.

Further trials with other food companies are set to be announced in coming months, and are likely to involve major suppliers and wholesalers. The FSA has also set up separate working groups to look at how the new system will work with large businesses, SMEs and local authorities.

FSA chair Heather Hancock claims there is overwhelming support from the supermarkets and insists the FSA is “not abdicating responsibility for food safety but it isn’t our job to make food safe. It’s always been businesses’ responsibility to make food safe.”

But others are shocked that big food might police the nation’s food safety.

“This is scandalous,” says Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy, Centre for Food Policy, City University, who was a special adviser to two Commons Select committee inquiries in the late 1990s, which resulted in the formation of the FSA.

“It’s a sign of a weak FSA and the fact that it happens to be turning to Tesco, of all companies, in its time of trouble, is a sign of the resurgence of Tesco only four years after Horsegate, but also very bad news for public health.

“For the FSA to risk losing its independent auditing function is a source of great sadness for people like me who worked so hard to get the FSA set up as an independent body. This is agency capture. The FSA was set up in the year 2000 and within eight years you had people with food connections on the board. Now, 16 years later, they are handing over responsibility to the big food companies.”

Failed inspections

Hancock, however, claims the changes proposed by the FSA will allow it to better target the “rogue companies” threatening the safety of the food system.

Last month The Guardian reported that one in 13 restaurants, and one in seven takeaways in the UK, had failed FSA food hygiene inspections under its flagship Food Hygiene Rating System (FHRS).The newspaper analysed FSA reports for more than 460,000 businesses and found almost 30,000, or 6.4%, had failed their inspections, including more than 7,000 takeaways and 8,000 restaurants.

Even more alarming is that many establishments may be going unpoliced altogether, adds Hancock.

She says the FHRS, or Scores on the Doors, has virtually ground to a halt in some areas because of local authority cutbacks. And other parts of the system are simply “stuck in the past”. Hancock uses the example of meat inspections, which are based “almost entirely on visual inspections”, she adds.

Yet with the involvement of the big industry guns and their technology, Scores on the Doors is exactly the sort of programme that could be rebooted, she argues.

In place of manpower-heavy inspections, smartphone apps could be used in conjunction with other technology to monitor the performance of supermarkets and restaurants more effectively, she suggests. And her vision of food safety inspections is all about making the system more agile so it can catch what she calls “the baddies under the radar”.

“This is not a transformation primarily driven by reduced resources,” she adds. “The current system is horribly complicated. When I arrived I asked if someone could please write down for me exactly how the food safety system works, nobody could do it. It was so horribly complicated you couldn’t do it even if you took up a whole wall.”

Dr Mike Bromley, founder of Genon Laboratories, a leading centre for food allergen testing, says it makes sense for the FSA to be exploring how it can tap big businesses like Tesco but warns the agency not to go too far towards light touch regulation.

“The Elliott review called for closer collaboration between food companies and if that happens this could be a good thing. But we saw with the banking system what can happen when you have light touch regulation. I would be worried that if the FSA relies on the systems people like Tesco have in place it could open the door for food contamination and food fraud.

“And I still think we need a system of inspectors on the ground, run by the FSA, to make the system safe,” he adds.

Helen Munday, chief scientist at the FDF, which is among those sitting on an advisory panel to advise the FSA over its proposals, supports in principle the concept of a proportionate inspection system based on risk.

“Food produced in this country is considered by leading experts to be amongst the safest in the world. Maintaining high food safety standards and consumer confidence in our products is the priority and trialling innovative approaches which support these aims is to be encouraged.”

But it’s not the industry that needs convincing. The first obstacle is local authorities, and not just in England but in Wales and Northern Ireland, too. “There are different views about the risks and it’s important to take into account differences in Wales and Northern Ireland,” admits Hancock. “But the case for change is nationwide.”

And local authorities are just the first hurdle: making the case to opponents of the industry, and to a public with recent memories of what happens when the food safety system goes wrong, could be the FSA’s biggest battle yet.