Trading standards and environmental health officers are acting “more like advisors than prosecutors” when it comes to enforcing regulations that govern nutrition and health claims, research has found.
Inflated health benefit statements, for example, are rarely clamped down on, the researchers said, thereby undermining shoppers’ confidence.
The study by experts at Manchester Metropolitan University and published in PLOS ONE journal, considered how the roles of health regulation officers has changed and what the implications are for consumers.
The team interviewed frontline enforcers from local authority regulatory services.
They found that despite an increase in the nutrition and health claims made for foods, there are “few reported cases of non-compliance prosecutions under the regulations”.
In fact, there was an expectation from businesses that regulators would be on hand to provide advice free of charge whenever it was required. And when “time-pressed” local authority regulators applied the law, they gave advice to businesses on how to comply instead of taking enforcement action. Sometimes this service attracted a fee.
Dr Ajay Patel, senior lecturer in food regulation law at Manchester Metropolitan and lead researcher, said the traditional view of regulators as quick to resort to legal action has given way to a “more lenient and accommodative approach in which they seek to ‘educate, persuade and cajole’ businesses”.
This approach may well be pragmatic but it “should not hamper a regulator’s ability to take action nor should it create a conflict of interest where the enforcer provides the advice as a service for which it levies a charge”.
