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8 pm
Mr. Peter Atkinson (Hexham): I congratulate the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw (Mr. Roy) on his speech, and on the way in which he described so graphically the tragic occurrence in his constituency. However, he was wrong to draw the conclusion that the tragedy could have been avoided if an "independent food standards agency", as he called it, had been established. If he will recall, the sheriff who investigated the matter found that it was caused by a failure of local enforcement and not of wider policy.
The problem--as my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Mr. Gill) said--is that Conservative Members do not believe that the Food Standards Agency will be truly independent. Nothing in the Bill itself says that the agency will be independent; indeed, the Bill describes the very close ties that the agency will have with Ministers. I suspect that, should there be another food crisis--such as the one in the constituency of the hon. Member for Motherwell and Wishaw--or another food scare, the buck will come straight back to Ministers, with newspapers demanding action by Ministers and not by the Food Standards Agency.
I was interested to hear the Minister of State say that the Bill was a very clear one until the lawyers got hold of it.
Mr. Rooker:
I said the White Paper.
Nevertheless, like my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow, I read the Bill. The major point on the agency's independence is dealt with in schedule 4, under "Minor and consequential amendments". The explanatory memorandum--and schedule 4--states quite clearly that the Bill
There we have a clear statement--absolutely in black and white, tucked away at the very back the Bill--that Ministers are taking to themselves powers to direct the agency. The Food Standards Agency will not be an independent agency or a replica of the American Food and Drug Administration, as it has been touted to be.
Mr. Rooker:
I shall do my best to respond to those points, both in my reply and in Committee. However, we have made it quite clear that the agency will be a non-ministerial Department, giving it the same legal status as Customs and Excise. In other words, it will work at an arm's-length distance from ministerial daily control. Moreover, ultimately and crucially, it will be accountable to the House. The agency will, therefore, not be able to write its own agenda--which is partly why its guiding principles have been enshrined in the Bill.
Mr. Atkinson:
The Minister was right to say that the agency will be like Customs and Excise--perhaps more so--as that body is not independent. The Food Standards Agency should not be proclaimed to be an independent agency, such as the American Food and Drug Administration--which receives United States Government funding, although it has no direct link to Ministers, as our agency will have.
The difference between the agency and Customs and Excise is that a Minister will have the power to direct that
The Bill is also opaque--although we have heard much talk in the debate about transparency--because of the way in which it has been drafted. Only when we do some digging do we begin to discover the huge powers that the Bill will give to Ministers to take over from local authorities.
I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow that the Bill's real weakness--which I urge Ministers to consider before it is considered in Committee--was created with the decision to put the Meat Hygiene Service under the agency's control. That decision also created the need for the paragraphs in schedule 4, which give Ministers the power to run the Meat Hygiene Service--which will be seen as both judge and jury by those who have to deal with it. The decision is a great mistake, as it will compromise such independence as the agency should have.
In his normal way, the Minister of Agriculture was suitably inscrutable in answering questions from Labour Back Benchers about precisely where the Food Standards Agency will start and stop. I realise that the agency is to do with food safety and with food standards, but I do not understand whether that will include, for example, welfare. The Minister was asked about animal welfare, but my impression--I shall have to read tomorrow's Hansard a bit more carefully--was that he did not answer the question.
I do not believe that the Food Standards Agency will be able to deal with welfare issues, or that it will have any influence on whether a British company buys Danish pork that is produced less satisfactorily than British pork, or on whether much of the chicken entering the United Kingdom from Thailand has been produced in what we would consider to be an inhumane way. I do not believe that the agency will have any remit to interfere with that trade, providing that the chicken meat arriving in the UK is considered safe.
There is obscurity also in relation to genetic modification. Will the agency have any discretion in how it deals with genetically modified foods? If genetically modified soya beans imported from the United States are considered safe--as they have been--by the American Food and Drug Administration, they will almost certainly be considered safe, for food safety purposes, by the Food Standards Agency. If the agency is at all independent, it will have to consider them safe.
Conservative Members' arguments about genetic modification are not necessarily about the safety ofaltered soya beans or maize products, but about the environmental impact of those crops--about which the Food Standards Agency will have absolutely no say. Therefore, on that issue--which is of singular importance to people--the Food Standards Agency will receive a battering, but will not be able to act.
As the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Mr. Tyler) said, there will also be a temptation for the agency to become a busy-body and nannying agency. There is also a threat that it will prevent those who still like to consume green-top milk and unpasteurised cheese from being able to continue doing something that they have done for a very long time.
Mr. Mark Todd (South Derbyshire):
I warmly welcome the Bill as an important step in improving United Kingdom food safety and nutritional standards. However, I should like to focus on only one of its specific aspects--about which we have heard some comment today--which is the concept of risk, as that concept is applied in the Bill.
The first thing to say is that we are largely ignorant about the true state of food safety in the United Kingdom, as the data are incomplete, and we have much evidence of under-reporting. The Bill provides for increased powers to increase reporting by responsible authorities, and that provision is clearly necessary.
The information that is available is extremely hard to interpret. The classic example of that is regional discrepancies in food poisoning across the United Kingdom. Generally, Northern Ireland has much lower levels of food poisoning than other areas. Scotland used to have a much higher level of food poisoning, although the latest statistics showed that that was not true at least for last year. It is also hard to interpret the data and reach a reasonable judgment on what is happening.
We also know painfully little about international comparisons on food safety. On the Agriculture Committee's visit to the United States, it became quite evident that there was much greater confidence in the United States in the various forms of agency involved in enforcing food safety and food standards. When one looked at the limited data available, one found little evidence for such confidence. There had been large-scale outbreaks of food poisoning, which would have caused great concern had they been repeated in this country.
We know little about the relative risks of the processes through the food chain from plough to plate. Without that, it is hard to decide where we should allocate resources. One of the key tasks of the agency will be to decide on the level of inspection and research to provide us with the answers. Thus far, we know very little about the precise point at which risk occurs most clearly.
We know intuitively that the risk of poor diet balance is far greater than the risk of food poisoning. Clearly, this issue will have to be weighed when the agency considers how to allocate its tasks and the weight of its responsibilities. The agency's role in addressing the balance of diet is welcome, but I shall not dwell on that issue this evening. We need far greater knowledge, and the agency has an extremely demanding task ahead of it in gathering that knowledge.
The agency must act proportionately to the risk, to the processes that are being studied and to the various sizes of business in this country. In that context, I welcome the dropping of the blanket charges to be levied by the agency. That is commendable. However, I retain the germ of a concern. I have often thought that when Britain lost an empire, it had to find roles for those trained in producing rules and close governance. We have heard of the lack of relationship between the quantity of regulation and the sought-for outcome in this matter.
The previous 10 years have seen an increase in concern and an increase in Government response, in terms of the amount of work and paper put into the task. One must say also that they have shown no evidence of a reduction in the quantity of food poisoning outbreaks. That gives some doubt to the idea that mere regulation is the solution to our problems.
On proportionality, it would be extremely easy for the agency to crush small food enterprises with intrusive regulations, and to become an obstruction to consumer choice. Other hon. Members have referred to the case of
the specialist cheese manufacturer who was tackled with an emergency control order, which effectively put the business out of action entirely. Many have argued that that was a disproportionate use of a power to respond to a genuine health issue. We must recognise the need for proportionality of response and respect for small food-producing enterprises.
Large producers with complex handling processes and long supply chains must, by their nature, carry greater risk than small producers with largely local supply chains and local customer bases. The closure of small enterprises may increase risks by elongating journeys and adding to the complexity of the food chain process. I am concerned about protecting and encouraging food enterprises. This country runs a deficit in milk-based products, in spite of having excellent raw materials. We must ensure that the regulatory framework allows that position to change.
It is critical that any controls and monitoring processes apply to imports at a level equivalent to those applied in the UK. We must recognise that that will be difficult, because the legal framework lies largely outside our control and is carried out by the European Union--albeit locally, by our agencies. Reaching a level of equivalence will be hard, but we must attempt it.
On education, we are moving towards a society of work-free and thought-free food, in which all the work is done by unknown hands. We are less and less aware of food science and of the reasons for what we are doing in the kitchen, which our parents would have readily understood. Our ignorance carries great risk. The Agriculture Committee has said that it is critical that the agency clearly defines the responsibilities of Government, of the food industry and of consumers themselves for food safety.
To try and pass the parcel away from the home is unrealistic, for obvious reasons, and it is dangerous in encouraging a degree of complacency--a belief that food can be totally safe. We will never achieve a clinical hospital environment for the production of our food--and arguably we never should, even if it were possible. Safety can never be assured. It is almost certainly true that there is as much risk in the domestic fridge and microwave as in some other parts of the food chain. Without pestering and intrusiveness, we should help to reverse the decline in public knowledge.
"provides for the Secretary of State to direct that a duty imposed on an enforcement body under the Act should instead be discharged by himself"--
meaning the Secretary of State for Health or the Minister of Agriculture. It also provides for
"the agency to be one of the bodies which may be named as an enforcement body in regulations made under section 6"
of the Act.
"a duty imposed on an enforcement body"--
which is the agency--
"should be discharged by himself".
That will impose even greater ministerial control over the agency than Ministers currently have over Customs and Excise.
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