A Call for Reform: FSA Chair’s speech to Food Thinkers seminar

Food regulators face new challenges face, as changes in the food industry over recent years continue to develop

The Chair of the Food Standards Agency (FSA), Professor Susan Jebb, recently spoke at City University’s ‘Food Thinkers’ seminar. During her speech she spoke about the new challenges facing food regulators, changes in the industry over recent years including the growth of app/online ordering and the entrance of aggregators such as Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo. She also spoke of proposals to meet these challenges going forward, including the suggestions that larger national retailers be regulated directly by the FSA as opposed to the current system of local authority regulation.

Professor Jebb noted there is a three-line defence system for food standards:

1. Food businesses themselves (with duties under food safety legislation).
2. Local authorities (inspection and enforcement).
3. Food Standards Agency (setting standards and undertaking inspections amongst other activities).

While rightly praising the work undertaken by local authorities in this area, concerns were noted as to the capacity of (circa. 350) local authorities to conduct this work. A 14% reduction in environmental health officers and 45% reduction in trading standards officers has been seen since 2012. As the current system is based around physical inspection of premises by these officers, fewer of them equates to fewer inspections. Professor Jebb highlighted that this approach of physical inspections was the same for all businesses regardless of the size of the business and number of premises operated. The current regime fails to rely upon a significant amount of data available for larger businesses, which she points out tends to be highly compliant (e.g. an average FHSR of 4.9/5 for the ten largest supermarket chains).

The FSA has been engaging in trials with large food businesses based on data analysis accompanied by targeted physical inspections. This trial enables the regulator to better target inspections and enforcement to likely higher risk areas, as Professor Jebb put it “smarter, more intelligence-led regulation” and compliant food businesses to reduce the amount of regulatory inspections/interventions, in a manner likely to be familiar to those with a Primary Authority relationship.

Looming over all areas of suggested reform is the issue of funding. It was suggested that local authorities could start recovering costs from businesses following inspections. While little information has been put forward about this, a useful guide is likely to be the Health and Safety Executive’s Fee For Intervention Scheme, where those considered to be non-compliant in the opinion of an inspector (in material breach of the legislation) are expected to contribute to the costs of regulating any breach.

It will be interesting to see the development of these suggestions over the coming years and we will continue to monitor.

Clyde & Co are specialists in dealing with issues relating to regulatory changes, and we are continually monitoring developments around all of the UK regulators. For more on this and other regulatory topics, you can read all of our previous articles here, and if you have any questions about this subject you can contact Alan Kells or any of our Safety, Health, Environment and Regulatory team.