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Mr. Rooker: I give an assurance to my hon. Friend and an apology to the House. Every single one of those guiding principles is in the Bill. The snag is that, between publication of the White Paper and the guiding principles in plain English and publication of the Bill, there was a thing called the lawyers. The guiding principles are in the Bill. I shall serve on the Committee and I shall be in a position to identify where every guiding principle is covered in the Bill.
Mr. Griffiths: That is another welcome statement from my hon. Friend. I am sure that those who serve on the Committee will relish his interpretation of the legal complications and language that have been substituted for the very plain English in the original consultation document.
Dr. Ian Gibson (Norwich, North): Next.
Mr. Griffiths: Next and, I hope, finally, the regulation of all public health aspects of pesticides, veterinary
medicines and BSE should be transferred to the FSA. Agriculture policy on those issues should be made separately by agriculture divisions and directorates, but acting within a regulatory framework set by the FSA.
Mr. David Maclean (Penrith and The Border): One of the few pleasures that I had after the general election two years ago was to listen to some of the speeches by the Minister of State.
Before the Minister has a panic attack, I assure him that I am not being facetious. I did have the pleasure of hearing him speak several times in the House, upstairs and before outside bodies, and it was wonderful to watch enlightenment dawn on him as he discovered that the officials in the Veterinary Medicines Directorate, the Pesticides Safety Directorate and all other parts of the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food were perhaps not--as he might have supposed when he was in opposition--autocratic and uncaring for public safety.
On various occasions, I heard the Minister vigorously defend the independence, neutrality, impartiality and integrity of his MAFF officials. I have mentioned only two directorates, but I am fairly certain that if I were to ask him to name any part of his Ministry or of the Department of Health where he thought the officials were not doing a proper job and protecting public health, he could not do so. I suspect that, in the past nine months, the Minister and his right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture have quickly discovered that the officials with whom they have the privilege of working in MAFF are conscientious, are all trying to do their bit to give Ministers proper and intelligent advice, and are not engaged in a ghastly conspiracy with producers, retailers or anyone else to cover up food safety scares.
Mr. Martyn Jones (Clwyd, South):
Surely the problem with the previous Government was that they received extremely good advice but ignored it.
Mr. Maclean:
There is no truth in that whatsoever. We have the Minister of State's word for it, because there is an extract from Hansard which I keep in files close by me. It relates to the BSE situation. The Minister of State, defending the ban on beef on the bone, said that if Ministers had not implemented the beef on the bone ban, this would be the first occasion "in living memory" when Ministers had not followed the advice of their officials.
I believe that the only time I refused to follow the advice of my officials was towards Christmas one year, when I was asked to advise the housewife on how to stuff the turkey. I concluded that it would be unwise for me to issue that advice, because it would be patronising and insulting.
Mr. Rooker:
I shall not argue over quotes from Hansard, but I know what I said that night. I said that it
Mr. Maclean:
That too is open to challenge. We may have to wait many months--or, at the present rate of progress, many years--before the inquiry reaches a conclusion on it.
However, I shall not conduct an argument along that route because I think that the Minister would still acknowledge that the advice that Ministers receive from officials is of the highest calibre, and that it did not suddenly change on 1 May 1997. I do not believe that officials gave Ministers in the previous Government duff advice and then thought, "My God--change of Government. We had better start giving proper advice." I make that point because the Minister of Agriculture said today that the new agency would do essentially what is being done now. I believe that that is exactly so.
I do not therefore say that the new agency will be merely cosmetic, but I see nothing fundamentally different about the research that the new agency will do, the advice that it will give, the problems that it will wrestle with and the difficulty of trying to explain the balance of risk to the public. The new agency will do nothing that officials in various directorates and divisions of MAFF and in the Department of Health are not currently doing.
What, then, is the purpose of the new agency? Probably, if the Labour manifesto had not promised to set up the agency, Ministers, with two years' experience of working with those Departments, would not now be promising one. But that is mere speculation. They have made the promise; they intend to deliver on it.
However, I envisage some of the effect of the agency as merely cosmetic: it will be to give the appearance that Ministers are being distanced from food safety decisions. The sole purpose of trying to institute the arm's length procedure is to try to give a new credibility to ministerial advice or advice from learned scientists on food safety.
The public have become entirely cynical about advice, whether it is on road safety matters from experts, whether it is from my friends down the road in Sellafield advising about nuclear safety, or whether it is from food scientists. There is a highly sceptical public--backed by an even more sceptical media, certain sections of which have a financial interest in keeping the public alarmed all the time. The public may not be reassured about the advice that the new agency gives.
I am worried that the agency might fail in some respects. It will fail not because it will deliberately endanger public health, because it will take ridiculous risks, or because it will be in a conspiracy with food producers to cover things up, but because it will not reach the high level of public expectation.
I have been reading a survey conducted by the Consumers Association. It welcomes publication of the draft Bill, as many other organisations have done. They have done so because they hope that it will be a brave new dawn--that the day the agency takes over, the "meeja", the press and the public will believe everything that it says about the high quality of our food. However, the Consumers Association said that its survey showed that the public's expectation of the FSA was unreasonably high. Ninety-seven per cent. of the people questioned wanted a guarantee from the FSA that food was safe. Of course people want that guarantee. They can never have it, under any Government or any agency, no matter whether the agency is stuffed with a million Philip Jameses or a million representatives of the food companies. It can never give that absolute guarantee.
My concern is that on the first occasion when there is a food safety problem, small or large, or when the Food Standards Agency has to say, "Well, we don't really know. It may be a new strain of cambylobacter. To err on the side of safety, perhaps we should withdraw some products, but we are not going to ban the lot," the Daily Express, the Daily Mail, The Sun and the others will say that the agency has failed--it did not clear the shelves and Ministers must intervene.
I see wry smiles on the faces of the Ministers. They know, and the House may admit, that on this occasion I may be right. The expectation that the agency will be a miracle cure-all for the problems of food safety is illogical. I understand the Government's difficulty. They cannot admit that the agency will not meet the public's expectations. They must present the agency as the fulfilment of an important manifesto pledge, and say that the wonderful new agency will do new things. The only new thing seems to be that it will publish ministerial advice. We did not do that--we published its effect and synthesised it into a more easily intelligible and readable leaflet.
"We will not be the first Government knowingly to put infectivity in the food chain."--[Official Report, 19 March 1998; Vol. 308, c. 1400.]
Later, I added:
"The House should think about what the headlines would have been had we been the first Government knowingly to allow BSE infectivity into the food chain."--[Official Report, 30 April 1998; Vol. 311, c. 445.]
I am not saying that the previous Government did it the other way round, but they certainly went in unknowingly.
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