Tracy Doherty, Senior Advisor on Food Hygiene with the Food Standards Agency in Northern Ireland talks to The Food Chain about Regulating Our Future.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is responsible for ensuring that an effective regulatory regime is in place to verify that food businesses meet their obligations to ensure food is safe and what it says it is.
The Regulating Our Future programme, which is one of our corporate priorities, aims to develop and implement a new sustainable approach to regulation that influences business behaviour to deliver benefits for consumers. We intend to design and implement a regulatory delivery model that ensures an effective approach to regulating food safety across the food chain, which makes use of all available data and is financially sustainable in the long term.
Getting it right from the start
We are developing a userfriendly digital platform for the registration and approval of food businesses. This will provide us, as the Central Competent Authority for food safety, with full oversight of all food businesses across England, Wales and Northern Ireland. This will help the FSA to identify and manage risk across the food chain and respond quickly and efficiently to food incidents and improve consumer protection. We will obtain sufficient information when a business registers to determine how the business is regulated in a proportionate way for that type of business.
This new registration system will go live in April 2019. There will be a communication campaign to raise awareness and promote the new registration system, and to provide relevant advice to new food businesses.
Fitting businesses into the regulatory model
There are a wide variety of food businesses, handling and producing different types of food which are being distributed through an increasingly complex food chain. Therefore, we will ensure that there is not a one size fits all approach to regulation in the future.
We are developing a more sophisticated risk model that will determine the nature, frequency and intensity of regulatory controls, that a food business will be subject to.
The current approach focuses on the type and scale of activity within a food business. In the future, we will also include a range of risk indicators based on wider information about the businesses, including information gathered at the point of registration/approval. A risk assessment and scoring model is being developed that will create a risk-based regulatory control plan based on a variety of risk attributes.
These changes will ensure that we recognise businesses who can demonstrate sustained compliance and help our local authority (LA) regulators to better target their resource on non-compliant food businesses.
National inspection strategies
The Primary Authority scheme is applicable in England and Wales but does not extend to the devolved food function in Northern Ireland. This scheme enables a business or a group of businesses to form a legally recognised partnership with an LA (known as the primary authority) that acts as the lead regulator for the business.
The primary authority can review business systems centrally, and if appropriate, advise the business that it is doing the right thing. This advice, known as Primary Authority Advice, must be taken into account by other LAs when dealing with that business e.g. when carrying out inspections or addressing non-compliance.
The primary authority may take the lead in coordinating local inspection of the business, guiding LAs on what to inspect based on risk, and can also guide frequency of inspection via an inspection plan. A national inspection strategy effectively allows a primary authority to take more control of proactive interventions across a business (or group of businesses), reducing proactive interventions if there is strong evidence that the business is compliant and managing its risks well.
Sustainable funding
Alongside the changes to the regulatory regime we will introduce a new funding model to ensure the future sustainability of the system.
We recognise that the FSA has an obligation to deliver an efficient and effective regulatory regime, which provides reassurance to the consumer that there is a robust system in place to protect public health.
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