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Industrial Research and Technology Unit

Ms McCafferty: To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland what performance targets have been set for the industrial research and technology unit for the financial year 1997-98. [12070]

Mr. Ingram: The following key targets have been set for the agency for 1997-98:

1. To maintain new user participation in the near market compete programme at 10 per cent.

2. To increase the average industry contribution to the compete and start--pre-competitive--programme by 1 per cent.

3. To achieve full cost recovery for scientific services.

4. To maintain NAMAS and BSI Accreditations.

5. To achieve efficiency savings of 3 per cent.

Prison Service

Ms McCafferty: To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland when the Northern Ireland Prison Service intends to publish its 1997 corporate and business plan; and what performance targets have been set for 1997-98. [12071]

Mr. Ingram: The Northern Ireland Prison Service's 1997 corporate and business plan was published today. For 1997-98 the following key performance targets have been set:

1. To ensure 100 per cent. security for prisoners in high and top risk categories. To ensure at least 99.5 per cent. security for prisoners in medium and low risk categories.

2. To ensure that the number of significant security breaches during 1997-98 does not exceed 7.3 per 100 prisoners.

3. To achieve an average five per cent. improvement in constructive activity hours during 1997-98.

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4. To conduct a further customer satisfaction survey of visitors in each establishment.

5. To offer sentence planning to all prisoners and young offenders who wish to participate in the scheme and to achieve a 50 per cent. uptake from eligible prisoners.

6. To ensure that the average cost per prisoner place does not exceed £76,252.

7. To achieve an average of five days training per member of staff.

AGRICULTURE, FISHERIES AND FOOD

Food Standards Agency

Ms Shipley: To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food what responses he has received to the consultation on Professor James's report on proposals for a food standards agency; and if he will make a statement.[11854]

Mr. John Cunningham: My right hon. Friend the Secretary of State for Health and I, with the Secretaries of State for Scotland, for Wales, and for Northern Ireland, welcome the excellent response to the consultation on Professor James's report. The Government have received replies from more than 630 organisations and individuals. The responses show that there is widespread support for the proposal to establish a food standards agency which would be a non-departmental public body accountable to Parliament through health Ministers and operating on a basis of openness and transparency; create a clear separation between the responsibilities for regulating food safety and for promoting the interests of food-related industries; promote food safety from "plough to plate".

Many detailed points were raised in the consultation, which we are now studying further. Our aim is to publish a White Paper in the autumn setting out the Government's response to Professor James's recommendations in the light of the first round of public consultation. The White Paper will itself be the subject of a second consultation and a draft Bill will then be drafted and published. We shall bring the Bill before Parliament as soon as parliamentary time permits.

It is the Government's intention to establish a shadow food standards commission once the necessary legislation has made sufficient progress through its parliamentary stages. We are also taking a range of measures to improve food safety arrangements in the transitional period before establishment of a food standards agency. The Minister for Food Safety and the Minister for Public Health will take on a joint role in preparing the way for the food standards agency and ensuring maximum protection for the public. They will carry out this day-to-day role in close consultation with their ministerial counterparts in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Overall policy co-ordination will rest with the ministerial committee on food safety, chaired by the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.

A key feature of the transitional arrangements will be developing further the independent advisory committees that advise the Government as a whole on food safety and related matters. The Food Advisory Committee will be given a special role in the handling of food safety issues that go beyond the remit of any one expert committee.

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In addition to these UK-wide measures, the Secretary of State for Health and I are taking specific steps to improve the management of food safety issues in England. A joint food safety and standards group will be formed from the relevant staff in MAFF and the Department of Health from 1 September 1997. The group will be headed by Mr. Geoffrey Podger, a Department of Health official currently seconded to MAFF. The new joint group will report to Ministers in both Departments. In Scotland, all food safety issues are handled by a single team which comes under the responsibility of the Scottish health Minister; in Wales all food safety issues come under the responsibility of the Welsh health Minister; and in Northern Ireland the Department of Health and Social Services has lead responsibility for food safety issues.

The chief medical officer, Sir Kenneth Calman, will be given a new high level co-ordinating role in the handling of issues of potential public concern about food. Sir Kenneth will have particular responsibility for a new joint MAFF-Department of Health risk communication unit which is to be established and further reinforced by the appointment of an external adviser. This role will be undertaken in consultation with territorial Departments.

We are also continuing to strengthen our approach to food safety issues taking account of the high priority we give to the protection of public health, the rigorous enforcement of measures designed to protect the public and our commitment to openness, transparency and responsiveness to consumer concerns.

I am placing copies of all the responses to the consultation on Professor James's report in the Library of the House.

Veterinary Field Service

Mr. Savidge: To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food whether the veterinary field service will become a next steps executive agency; and if he will make a statement. [12068]

Dr. John Cunningham: I have decided that the veterinary field service should not at present become an executive agency.

Following an internal review of MAFF veterinary services under the last Government, the VFS structure was streamlined. One recommendation in that review was that the VFS should become a next steps agency. It would be inappropriate to proceed with a move to agency status given the move towards establishing the food standards agency and devolution, which have implications for the state veterinary service.

Radioactive Waste

Mr. Godman: To ask the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food if he will make a statement on the dumping of radioactive waste at sea. [12069]

Mr. Rooker: My Department and others concerned with the disposal of radioactive waste have undertaken detailed searches of archive records relating to dumping at sea at Beaufort's dyke and elsewhere. Details of the searches carried out so far and the findings of each Department have been placed in the Library of the House.

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Information was found of two further instances of radioactive waste being dumped, or possibly being dumped, in Beaufort's dyke in addition to that reported to the House on 1 July, Official Report, columns 158-60. The first instance was identified by the Scottish Office from a reference on one paper and relates to a disposal being arranged in 1957 at Cairn Ryan, a port used for the disposal of munitions to Beaufort's dyke, of a damaged closed caesium 137 source. There is no indication of the disposal site or any other information on the form of disposal. The level of radioactivity is described as about one quarter curie.

The second instance was identified by my Department concerning the dumping in 1976 of about 10,000 tonnes of building rubble and soil from the demolition of the premises of Thorium Ltd., a company that extracted thorium from minerals and left a waste product containing enhanced levels of naturally radioactive material. The authorisation required that the average radioactivity of this demolition material should be less than 10- ⁴ microcuries/gm and was not to exceed 5 x 10- ³ microcuries/gm in any part.

In respect of other locations not previously recognised as dump sites for radioactive waste, the Scottish Office has identified the following information:

scrap from a Ferranti radioactive valve manufacturing unit was dumped by Ferranti between 1954 and 1957 in the Firth of Forth off North Queensferry. An estimate at the time put this at 7.5 mg of radium bromide at six-monthly intervals;

advice to UK Time Ltd. in 1949 to dispose of 35,000 luminised dials likely to have contained in total between 25 and 50mg radium either on land or in sealed drums at least 5 miles off shore. A subsequent paper suggests that such dumping continued in the North sea during the 1950s;

the dumping by ICI Ltd. of two anti-static devices--strontium 90--at the explosives disposal site off the Isle of Arran prior to 1958;

the dumping in 1963 at Garroch head, on the Clyde, of material from the clear-up of a former radium factory at Balloch.

In checking these historic records, Departments have in addition identified instances when liquid wastes or sludge containing small amounts of radioactivity were dumped at sea through dispersion into the water column from ships. These disposals were from the naval dockyards at Chatham and Rosyth into the North sea beyond the Thames estuary and the Firth of Forth respectively during the mid to late 1960s and early 1970s; sludges from industrial sources containing enhanced natural radioactivity into the Liverpool bay area, and possibly Morecambe bay and the Humber estuary, during the early to mid 1970s; and mildly radioactive solutions from early experiments at MAFF's Lowestoft laboratory in the North sea in the late 1940s.

Where possible, these reports are being following up to see whether further information can be obtained.

On the evidence of the papers that have been examined, I am advised that, even using cautious assumptions, it is estimated that radiation exposures to the public following any dispersal of radioactivity in the sea would give rise to radiation dose levels well within the International Commission on Radiological Protection recommended dose limit and a small fraction of those arising from natural background radioactivity. Nevertheless, I am arranging for the National Radiological Protection Board to make an independent assessment of this information

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and anything further that can be found. In particular, I shall ask it to advise me of the radiological significance of the disposals and on whether there is any need for monitoring over and above that which is already undertaken. I shall report further to the House when I have received the board's advice.

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