A leading professional body has expressed concern over plans to allow supermarkets to use data from their own audits to demonstrate compliance with food hygiene standards.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has put forward proposals that would see large grocers like Tesco and Sainsbury’s submit data from their third party auditors to inform the food hygiene rating awarded to stores.
However the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health (CIEH) has raised “significant concerns” over the impact of a “significant regulatory shift” that it says risks a loss of consumer confidence in the way food is regulated.
The FSA has been piloting the so-called ‘nation level regulation’ system with five major retailers – Tesco, Asda, Aldi, Sainsbury’s and Waitrose. It argues the new approach will continue to provide strong protection for consumers while making better use of limited local authority resources and providing greater consistency for businesses.
Currently, every food business premises is regulated by the local authority where it is based through regular inspections or interventions by environmental health officers. This is the same for large national chains as it is for retailers or restaurants operating a single site.
Local authorities would still have the ability to carry out inspections of large retailers under the new regime, however these would be at a much lower frequency should they validate retailers’ own audit results.
In an open letter to the FSA leadership team, the CIEH raised a number of concerns over the new approach including a loss of consumer confidence in the regulatory system, as well as the potential to add to public health risks and overturn decades of local authority-based food inspection and monitoring.
It also expressed concern over the FSA assuming direct regulatory control for large national food businesses and said the process had been subject to a lack of transparency.
“We recognise the importance of regulatory modernisation, but we are concerned the lack of robust evidence and meaningful consultation with stakeholders may result in proposals that will not deliver for consumers,” said Fran McCloskey, CEO of CIEH.
At a meeting this week, FSA board members discussed a proposal to move ahead with a small-scale phased implementation of national level regulation in England involving businesses who participated in the trial and potentially other large retailers.
It said more work would be needed to establish the case for national level regulation in other parts of the food sector such as manufacturing and food-to-go.
A wider shift to national level regulation for large businesses across the four home nations would require approval from devolved governments and UK government ministers.
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