UK Food Safety Concerns Remain Despite New Inspections Framework

The United Kingdom’s Food Standard’s Agency is set to intro­duce a new risk man­age­ment frame­work that it hopes will tackle the changes expected to occur in food safety law. This comes as the United Kingdom’s gov­ern­ment pro­ceeds with its plan to with­draw from the European Union, which will also lead to remov­ing itself from the lead­er­ship of Europe’s Food Safety Authority in just 20 months’ time.

Many key pol­icy mak­ers and researchers fear that Brexit will have cat­a­strophic con­se­quences for the UK’s food safety stan­dards, result­ing in relaxed food laws and food trade deals that cre­ate lower food stan­dards. It is feared this will even­tu­ally lead to the mar­ket being flooded with cheap, low-qual­ity imported prod­ucts from coun­tries with lower qual­ity reg­u­la­tions such as China and the USA.

Currently, a third of the UK’s food sup­ply is brought in from the European Union, and the country’s with­drawal from the EU means that a large food trade part­ner­ship dis­solved. According to the Food Standard’s Agency, new reg­u­la­tions are being drafted as part of a proac­tive approach to address risks present in the cur­rent reg­u­la­tory sys­tem before an actual cri­sis occurs.

It will rely on indi­ca­tors and data to deter­mine the risk being pre­sented by food busi­nesses, eval­u­at­ing the behav­ior and cul­ture of the busi­nesses in ques­tion. These new reg­u­la­tions will pro­vide reg­u­la­tory assur­ance that the Food Standard’s Agency hopes will improve stan­dards and reduce admin­is­tra­tive has­sles while enforc­ing action against busi­nesses that don’t com­ply.

As part of this process, busi­nesses across the food chain will be required to par­tic­i­pate in an enhanced reg­is­tra­tion sys­tem that will require more detailed infor­ma­tion from them. This will be used to bet­ter seg­ment busi­nesses and the sys­tem will favor those with a his­tory of com­pli­ance – mean­ing they will face less fre­quent and robust inspec­tions.

Despite these mea­sures, many lead­ing researchers feel not enough it being done to address how Brexit will impact food safety in the United Kingdom. A recent paper pub­lished by researchers at three lead­ing UK uni­ver­si­ties cites 16 major issues that they believe the gov­ern­ment will face come March 2018 that have ​“the poten­tial to threaten UK food resilience and secu­rity.”

The paper, ​“A Food Brexit: time to get real – A Brexit Briefing,” fea­tures input from Tim Lang (a pro­fes­sor of Food Policy at the University of London’s Centre for Food Policy), Erik Millstone (pro­fes­sor of Science Policy at the University of Sussex’s Science Policy Research Unit) and Terry Marsden (pro­fes­sor of Environmental Policy and Planning and Director of Sustainable Places Research Institute at Cardiff University’s School of Regional Planning and Geography).

The paper cau­tions that the UK is cur­rently suf­fer­ing from many issues relat­ing to food, labor, agri­cul­ture and sup­ply that will all be dras­ti­cally impacted by ​‘Food Brexit’ and cur­rent mea­sures are not suf­fi­cient to address the upcom­ing impact this will have on all aspects of food safety and secu­rity.

The authors go on to state that there are ​“seri­ous risks that stan­dards of food safety will decline if the UK ceases to adopt EU safety rules, and instead accepts free-trade agree­ments with coun­tries with sig­nif­i­cantly weaker stan­dards.”

The United Kingdom has already begun nego­ti­at­ing a future trade deal with American sup­pli­ers of poul­try, dairy and meat which many have pointed out do not cur­rently meet the qual­ity stan­dards out­lined by the European Food Safety Authority as they con­tain pes­ti­cides, banned fla­vor­ings and more.

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• Paper by Tim Lang, Erik Millstone and Terry Marsden