Food supply chain interim review published
Professor Chris Elliott, Director of the Institute for Global Food Security at Queen’s University Belfast, has today published the first part of his review looking at how the safety and authenticity of food supplies in the UK can be protected.
Following the horsemeat crisis in February 2013, Professor Elliott was asked by the Secretaries of State for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department of Health to look at what can be done to ensure that the food being bought and eaten by consumers in the UK is what it says it is.
Professor Elliott said:
“The UK has some of the highest standards of food safety in the world. Food production is a global industry and we need to ensure that our high standards are maintained across the whole supply chain.
“The horsemeat crisis clearly showed criminal activity in the global food chain and while the next stage of my review will gather more evidence on this it is right that measures are in place to further protect consumers. The food industry and the government are already striving to achieve this.”
In this first report, Professor Elliott has made recommendations about action that can be taken now to improve the assurance and integrity of food supply networks, including:
- All parties who operate and manage the food chain must put consumers first over all other aims. To this end, contamination and adulteration of food, along with making false claims relating to food products, must be made as difficult as possible to commit. Food safety and food crime prevention must be considered the primary objectives.
- Data collection and well-structured surveys should be considered as a matter of urgency, by both Government and industry, to fill the knowledge gap of the extent of any criminal activity within the UK food supply network;
- Industry shouldn’t relax their efforts to provide safe food but must also consider the prevention of food crime a primary objective.
- A project should be launched, led by the FSA and Department for Health, to explore the feasibility of a shared public laboratory service for the food authenticity testing currently undertaken by Public Analysts in local authority-owned labs.
- The auditing of food businesses, by Government and industry, particularly high risk premises, must be more focused on detecting fraud. Traders and brokers must be subjected to the same level of scrutiny.
- The ‘Food Authenticity Programme’, which has the lead role for supporting research into food authenticity testing, and policy over compositional labelling, should return from Defra to the FSA; and
- FSA should work to ensure they have an up-to-date crisis management plan, working more closely with Defra and Department of Health to ensure their respective roles are clear in the event of a major incident.
The report also sets out a number of areas where further work will be needed to develop and implement the recommendations, including:
- A specialist ‘Food Crime Unit’, with the expertise to undertake investigations into serious food fraud, should be hosted by the FSA;
- Both industry and Government should create ‘intelligence hubs’, to gather, analyse and disseminate information about food crime;
- The FSA should remain a non-Ministerial department but changes to its governance arrangements, as set out in more detail in the review, are necessary to make it a more robust organisation
- Statutory guidance should be provided for those ultimately responsible for providing food to vulnerable people, such as hospitals, schools and the elderly, setting out what to include in catering and other food contract to ensure the validation and assurance of their supply chains
Work on the review will continue into 2014, with further discussions with Government, industry and other groups on how these first recommendations can be implemented. Professor Elliott’s final report will be published in spring 2014.
Responding to the interim Elliott review published today, Environment Secretary Owen Paterson said:
“I am pleased that Professor Elliott’s interim review recognises that there are good systems in place to ensure UK consumers have access to some of the safest food in the world. We want to keep it that way.
“It is appalling that anyone was able to defraud the public by passing off horsemeat as beef. That is why I commissioned an urgent review into the integrity of our food network.
“The UK food industry already has robust procedures to ensure they deliver high quality food to consumers and food businesses have a legal duty to uphold the integrity of food they sell. It is rightly highly regarded across the world and we must not let anything undermine this or the confidence of consumers in the integrity of their food.
“We will continue to work closely with the food industry, enforcement agencies and across local and central Government to improve intelligence on food fraud and our response to it.”
Significant action is already being taken to prevent and identify food crime, including:
- Unannounced inspections of meat cutting plants have increased, with 1,450 having taken place since January this year;
- The food industry undertakes a rigorous testing programme to ensure food authenticity. For horsemeat alone, the results of 31,000 tests have been reported to the Food Standards Agency;
- The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is undertaking a study to test that products which are labelled as being from the UK are, in fact, from the UK;
- The Government has increased funding to £2 million to support local authorities’ coordinated programme of food sampling;
- The Food Standards Agency will lead further testing of beef products for horsemeat;
- The Food Standards Agency is working with the European Commission (DG SANCO) and other Member States to establish an EU wide food fraud unit;
- The Food Standards Agency is working with industry and the European Commission to identify further targeted sampling programmes and how they might be implemented;
- The Food Standards Agency is developing a new Intelligence Hub to improve its capability to identify, and prevent, threats to food safety and integrity that are identified by expert analysis based on the approach to intelligence used by police
The interim report will now be considered ahead of Professor’s final report due to be published next year.
The full review can be found here:
The review was commissioned in May 2013 by the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Department of Health:
Professor Elliott is Director of the Global Institute for Food Security at Queen’s University Belfast. He has published over 250 papers in the field of detection and control of chemical contaminants in agri-food commodities, coordinated one of the world’s largest research projects in this area, and coordinates another major EU research project (QSAFFE) that deals with contaminant issues within the animal feed supply chain. He received a Winston Churchill Fellowship in 1993, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Chemistry, the Institute of Biology and Institute of Food Science Technology.
