Ensuring food safety standards

The FSA should establish the role that sampling plays in reducing risks to consumers. As part of its work on developing a sampling strategy, it should assess what level of and approach to sampling is needed to provide assurance that food risks, including food fraud, are being managed effectively by food businesses.

The FSA should address gaps in outcome-based measures and targets for assessing compliance with food safety and composition standards. It should press ahead with developing indicators for assessing the performance of local authorities in providing assurance that food businesses are compliant with food standards and measures of whether the Food Crime Unit is having an impact in tackling food fraud. It should set a target for when it will establish a suite of indicators to measure whether the FSA is effective in providing assurance to consumers that food is what it says it is.

The FSA should press ahead with its ambition to introduce mandatory display of hygiene ratings in food businesses in England. Recognising the requirement for legislation and current demands on Parliamentary time, the FSA should aim to do this within an achievable time period to improve information available to consumers.

The FSA should address gaps in the enforcement powers, including those available to the National Food Crime Unit. Given the additional funding that has been directed towards the National Food Crime Unit, the FSA should make firm plans to provide the powers the National Food Crime Unit needs to work independently.

The organisations in the food regulation system should work together to assess government’s appetite for risk and to take decisions on the level of funding required to ensure that food is safe to eat and what it says it is. They should consider the advantages and risks of a range of funding distribution options to ensure a sustainable regulatory system. These could include recovering costs from businesses, centralised national systems of controls or a range of commissioning models.

Within six months of the UK leaving the EU, the FSA should start to work closely with the other departments in the regulatory system to evaluate the medium- and longer-term impacts of EU exit on the capacity of the food regulation system and potential shortfalls in resources and set a timescale for reporting. It should identify what needs to be done to mitigate risks and make plans now to avoid food incidents, which could impact on future confidence and may affect trading relationships. This will require scenario-based analysis of potential future controls on imports, additional food safety and standards checks that may be required to support UK exports, and an assessment of the impact of increasing volumes of imports from new trading partners.