The FSA boss who’s bringing a ‘sense of partnership’ to Defra

The government must help provide the UK with long-term food security while enabling businesses to tackle future shocks.

Those are the words of Defra’s new food boss Emily Miles, who is rejoining the department after five years dealing with a string of crises as FSA chief executive.

Speaking exclusively to The Grocer, Miles says trusting the food industry to do the right thing while maintaining public faith in food policymakers has become her mantra.

It’s a mantra formed by many years of experience. Miles joined the regulator in 2019, months before the pandemic. Having been group director of strategy at Defra, she co-ordinated its work on the consequences of Brexit.

Next week, Miles returns to Defra, where she will take on the role of director general of food, biosecurity and trade.

She brings with her eye-opening lessons from the FSA. For starters, taking the helm during the pandemic taught Miles the importance of juggling food safety laws with the grim reality of overstretched resources.

Huge reliance on foreign vets, many of whom returned home when the crisis struck, exposed the inflexibility of food safety labelling laws, she admits.

“The thing that I still feel is not resolved is the issue about how food labelling rules work in a crisis. There were huge amounts of eggs and flour destined for hospitality that suddenly might end up in retail and there were very different rules.

“What we needed to do was try to work out how rigidly we were going to apply the rules.

“That still feels like undone business. We need something a bit like what happened with competition law, which got suspended for a bit during Covid.”

On the other side of the coin, Miles was closely watching Defra’s handling of the pandemic – and was reminded of the importance of working with the industry. “We saw with the FRIF ‘war room’ model the government made during the pandemic, that worked really well.”

The same principle applied to Defra’s preparation for a no-deal Brexit, which was well thought through, she says. “We realised we had to have really good information flow from the food system into Defra and out again.

“It resulted in a sense of partnership working between industry and government, which I still feel. When I meet CEOs, they clearly really value that access and Defra’s ability to listen. The question is how you transfer that sense of partnership into peacetime, rather than ‘wartime’ operations.”

Food fraud scandal

Covid wasn’t the only eye-opening crisis to hit Miles during her time at the FSA. Two years after lockdown, the FSA faced a major food fraud scandal.

An investigation by Farmers Weekly found that mislabelled, and possibly even rotten, meat may have been sold by Loscoe Chilled Foods to supermarkets, hospitals and schools, over a period of at least 20 years.

Miles refuses to comment on the ongoing investigation, but, after emergency talks with industry bodies across the meat and farming sector, it led to a major shake-up of how the FSA handles whistleblowing.

The incident reawakened the horrors of the horsemeat scandal 10 years earlier, but Miles insists she is satisfied with its response, including the launch of a confidential freephone line.

She concedes too much emphasis was placed on sharing information with the Food Industry Intelligence Network and its membership of fewer than 60 major food businesses, rather than the many thousands of others on the frontline.

But she also claims some of the criticism has been unfair. “The thing that people don’t always understand is the significance of us doing a criminal investigation. We were not able to give a running commentary.”

Then, in 2023 came another large piece of work. Miles oversaw a huge shake-up of food standards inspections aimed at enabling cash-strapped local authorities to focus on the highest risk areas of the supply chain – in what was billed as the biggest change to the food standards regime for decades.

“We changed our approach to food standards and what local authorities should be doing,” says Miles. “The inspection regimes we were assessing were overprioritising very low-risk premises, so we redid the risk matrix and redid our approach to local authorities.”

Miles’ departure from the FSA coincides with a move that could prove even more controversial. As revealed by The Grocer this week, the FSA plans a shake-up of the ‘scores on the doors’ food hygiene ratings system that could see supermarkets – and possibly out-of-home chains such as Greggs – supply the data for the system.

More, not less, information

Miles says it’s about more than saving money. “We’re saying there are a small number of retailers with thousands of stores doing a huge amount of food hygiene audits using third-party providers,” she says.

“Over the course of the pilot we have had access to 10,000 store audits compared to what we would have had from local authority inspections, which would have been 1,500. So we’re suddenly getting access to way more information.”

While she is conscious to avoid a “cosy relationship”, the direction of travel at the agency is clearly to focus on smaller businesses – such as “rogue” takeaways, which it believes pose a greater risk.

“There are a very small number of lazy or non-compliant businesses that are behaving badly and they are the ones who need really close engagement and actually I think the local authorities are brilliantly placed to do that,” says Miles.

“For someone like Tesco, I don’t think local authorities can add a lot of value. If they can put the support into the local takeaways where they don’t have the luxury of big head offices with compliance departments, then that’s good news.”

Maybe so, but there is a wider context at play. The plans come less than three months after one person died and more than 120 others were hospitalised in the UK amid an e.coli outbreak linked to lettuce, which sparked a mass recall of sandwiches in supermarkets. So the prospect of large retailers facing fewer FSA inspections will undoubtedly be hugely controversial.

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Miles insists the UK is “on top of the situation” in food-borne illness, though once again the agency took flak for its communication around the e.coli crisis.

“The STEC outbreak involved a large number of outlets and we were convening across several organisations, not just the FSA,” she says. “But if you look at the stats of STEC in 2023, there was a fall on 2022.

“We were doing an enormous amount and my regret is that we didn’t show our workings a bit more,” she adds.

Ultimately, however, Miles says the biggest threat to food safety and the UK’s food security comes from a lack of investment and effective strategies.

“While I’m happy with the job we’ve been doing on food safety as a whole, and I do feel confident about the way we’re protecting the public, there are chinks in the armour,” Miles admits. “There are risks associated with the degrading of that inspection capability, the vets, the environmental health officers, the Trading Standards inspectors. We would be fools to allow that to degrade too much.

“If you look at any of the big food scandals of the last 30 years, from BSE to salmonella in eggs to horsemeat, it’s just not worth it.”