Food Policy Has Gone Back Into The Shadows

The UK is in desperate need of an independent, non-ministerial department responsible for food and health, which champions and protects the public. Political memories are short. We have forgotten that we used to have one. It was called the Food Standards Agency.

News that hospital admissions related to food-linked illnesses in England are rising steeply have led a well-respected expert, Tim Lang, food policy professor at City University, to say that the public is now ‘playing Russian roulette with food’.

The Guardian revealed this month that hospitals recorded three admissions for every 100,000 people for salmonella last year, an all-time high. Admissions caused by campylobacter, the most common cause of food poisoning, and E. coli, which can be the most deadly, are also on an upward trend.

The UK Health Security Agency may attribute this to advancements in molecular diagnostics, but Lang, and other commentators, point to other probable factors. They include Brexit, which has drastically reduced inspection of high-risk imported foods, the stripping of capacity from local government and the move to self-regulation for businesses, both in food safety and port health controls.

Lang told RHE Global: “Food safety is taking a low priority. It has fallen off the government’s agenda. History shows us that it takes something to go wrong for this policy area to lead to a public health response.”

UK history bears this out. In 1984, the deaths of 19 elderly people in the Stanley Royd Hospital in West Yorkshire from salmonella led to tighter legal controls. In 1996, an outbreak of E. coli 0158 in Lanarkshire that claimed 21 lives caused a similar public outcry and calls for legislative action. The BSE epidemic of the 1980s and ’90s was partly attributed to unhygienic abattoirs. Their inspection was transferred from local authorities to a new body, the Meat Hygiene Service, in 1995.

Creation of new agency

The fallout from Lanarkshire and BSE led to another important change. In 2000, a revolutionary new body, the Food Standards Agency was set up. It was given a distinctive green logo and guaranteed political independence. It held its meetings in public, which was unheard of for what was, effectively, a branch of the civil service. The live-streamed meetings were well attended and reported in the national press. Reporting to the Department of Health, the FSA was tasked with two purposes – raising the profile of food safety and making the public healthier.

It became the lead body for UK food safety systems which are enforced by local government officers called EHOs – a system that began with Victorian public health legislation. The agency began strongly, it dealt successfully with emerging food safety threats, introduced a food hygiene rating system against strong opposition, ‘scores on the doors’, and significantly reduced campylobacter from infected poultry, with a targeted campaign.

In retrospect, amnesia began the day after it set up shop. As memories of Stanley Royd, BSE and Lanarkshire faded, the FSA was downgraded and stripped of powers. In 2010, perceived as ‘too political’ by a new government, particularly in its advocacy of traffic light labelling, it lost its responsibility for nutrition policy, including labelling, to the Department of Health. Whitehall culture, which is resistant to openness, was reasserting itself. The ten-year old agency narrowly avoided complete abolition by health secretary Andrew Lansley in 2010 when the political urge to deregulate was at its height.

The FSA survived by the skin of its teeth, but the shift of governments over the past 14 years away from positive health interventions, massive de-investment in local government and the UK’s detachment from Europe, with its well-developed scientific and food alert services and controls, have left us with a publicly run food safety service which is a shadow of what it was.

The world is more complicated than when the FSA began. Allergies and intolerances, acrylamide, dioxins and new foodborne viruses have entered the vocabulary of food safety. The subject is highly political, as it always has been. Impartial advice to government risks being polluted by producer interests. Demarcation lines are important – are obesogenic environments and ultra-processed foods legitimate areas for regulation?

Consumers are talking about food and health more than ever but policy making has gone back into the shadows. We are in desperate need of an independent, non-ministerial executive department which wrests policy making from civil service invisibility and the interests of food manufacturers and champions the public – something like the original Food Standard Agency. And funding for frontline food safety services needs to be restored.

The implications of not having such an agency, and of decades of under-resourcing, are beginning to show, with a reported increase in the main forms of infectious intestinal disease contracted from food. History risks repeating itself. The consequences could become even more serious.