Examination of Witnesses (Questions 860
- 879)
MONDAY 15 MARCH 1999
MR MICHAEL
ASHLEY, MR
NICK CULL,
MR RON
SHERWOOD, MR
STEVE BUTTERWORTH,
MR BOB
STEVENS and MR
E BRAXTON REYNOLDS
860. Can I ask the civil servants, is there
anything written down about how the specifications are going to
be drawn up or have I missed that?
(Ms Wordley) As you know, it is not set out in
the Bill, although of course there are powers under the Food Safety
Act to draw up codes of practice, so there could be codes of practice,
but there are already, as Mr Ashley and Mr Cull have mentioned,
discussions going on as to how in practice these standards should
be developed.
Dr Brand
861. Can I explore that a little further
because it is a bit curious, this Bill, because we seem to have
this co-operative approach, joint standards and everything works
swimmingly and then suddenly there is this big stick and there
does not seem to be anything in between those two. Also if the
Agency withdraws the contract, which is not a contract from the
local authority, how is funding going to be shifted? Would it
not be more sensible really to have a contractual relationship
between the Agency and LACOTS or through LACOTS with the local
authority? It would get over the ring-fencing issue on what sort
of money you can spend and provided you have a contract which
is auditable, you could then adjust things as they go along rather
than having a situation where it is either all or nothing.
(Mr Ashley) If I can make a start on that, the
idea of the rather sudden leap from the harmonious production
of joint standards to, as you call it, the big stick we would
very much want to avoid. I think it would be very strange——
862. I imagine it could be an acrimonious
situation for a number of years because there is not a direct
contractual relationship that you can actually measure, but there
are going to be indications of what you might be expected to perform,
and if a local authority digs its heels in, it could take years
to sort that one out rather than having a clear relationship.
(Mr Ashley) I rather suspect and I rather hope
that it will not take years. I do not think it would be acceptable
for a clearly failing authority not taking account of national
standards, not listening to the proddings of colleague professionals,
taking no notice of the inter-authority auditing that we want
to see. If they are simply determined not to deliver a proper
service, we have no problem about sooner rather than later that
being dealt with. Now, having said that sort of toughly, we actually
do hope that the main responsibility will be taken by local authorities
individually and collectively with LACOTS, with the kind of joint
work that we have talked about, but if that does not work, then
there are clear powers which we support in the Bill that the Government
would be able to act. In terms of your contract concept, it does
seem to me that we still, however, start from the point of view
that we do want to see the major primary responsibility for food
control and enforcement to be with local authorities, but it is
a statutory responsibility on them and not something that should
be the subject of a contract, whilst accepting that if they fail
in their responsibility, action could be taken. On ring-fencing,
I think that is an interesting debate that perhaps other questions
will refer to later. Although individual groups and professions
and groups of officers may favour ring-fencing and believe that
part of the troubles here are that the money has not been able
to be ring-fenced in terms of local government financial arrangements,
the LGA's view generally, albeit with exceptions, is that because
there is a huge range of demands that are placed on local authorities
and they simply have to juggle as best they can meeting the various
needs and responsibilities that they have within what they regard
as a limited amount of money, in general we oppose ring-fencing
because it simply creates too many stickinesses in terms of the
very difficult job of meeting our responsibilities across a very
wide range.
Chairman: I would
like to bring Diana Organ in here.
Mrs Organ
863. We want to talk about the finances,
the resources and the ring-fencing. Do we not have a problem here,
in that you have talked about raised expectation? We are talking
about the Food Standards Agency coming in. We are talking about
the Minister saying that he wants "an improvement in enforcement
inspections" because you are going to get a whole load more
dosh from the levy. However, the big problem is, as we know from
what happened with the Food Safety Act 1990, you were given a
whole load of extra responsibilities, and in my authority the
trading standards people have told me they did not get a penny
extra. So if you do not ring-fence it, because it is down to local
demography—and with the best will in the world, the areas
we are talking about are not as sexy as education and social services,
and members will make decisions accordingly—you are not
going to get any more money. So how are you going to do it? How
are you going to meet all these things which we have just been
talking about for the last three-quarters of an hour?
(Mr Butterworth) It goes back to where we started
this debate, which was on standards. At this moment in time there
is a lack of clear standards. It is very easy for a chief officer
to go back to elected members and say, "This is a statutory
responsibility", but they would then try to find out where
that bottom line is. If we reduce the number of food inspections
and take less food samples, at what point are you deemed to be
a failing authority, and at what point is a government agency
or department going to intervene? So it is our expectation and
our hope that once you get clear standards and you get some indication
that somebody is going to be held to account if they do not meet
those standards, then even if you do not get ring-fencing—and
it would be our profession's preference to get the money ring-fenced—if
that does not come about, that there is an indication that with
the passage of any new legislation, first and foremost they have
taken account of the needs of local authorities to discharge those
responsibilities; and secondly that that amount of money is made
clear and transparent, so we do not have to get into some kind
of beauty contest with schools and social services.
864. So you would advocate ring-fencing
the money?
(Mr Butterworth) Yes, we would.
(Mr Sherwood) I would not disagree with him either.
I think we are talking about modulating standards. You keep mentioning
this word "standard". I am not sure that at this moment
in time any of us has got anywhere near to defining what that
standard is. At the moment we have various Audit Commission measures
which ostensibly only measure the number of inspections done.
There is little to measure the quality of those inspections or
the outcome and whether there is a significant improvement in
food safety coming out. I think there is a whole world there which
needs looking at, and there is much work which needs doing. The
CIEH have been doing work, and others have as well, to try to
establish some means of measuring the outcome and whether the
actual food safety is improving in particular premises.
(Mr Ashley) I have to say that we recognise that
there is a genuine dilemma here. We are also aware that the roughly
£30 million which was put into the Local Government Settlement
following the 1990 Act was not generally spent on food control.
We have actually written to our members, we circularised our members
and indicated that we felt this was unfortunate. The Government
had given pretty clear signals, even if there was no ring-fencing
there, that this Act was meant to improve standards, and that
money, frankly, should have been spent in that area. However,
we are torn, because in general, instead of appearing here today
to talk about food, the Local Government Association could be
talking about education, or social services, or libraries, and
each of those services would come with an argument that their
service is essential, in many cases statutory, and that it is
extremely difficult to require that kind of ring-fencing all across
the board if the total amount of money then is not sufficient
to meet those statutory responsibilities.
865. With the best will in the world, though,
if you do not have ring-fencing or you do not become agents of
a national food agency, we are going to have the same thing again,
and you are going to have loads of authorities saying, "Well,
we're failing, and if we're failing that's not really such a bad
thing, because then that responsibility gets taken away from us
and we don't have to worry about how we're going to resource it."
So we are going to have not a driving up of standards, but an
interim of a whole load of smaller authorities failing, because
with the best will in the world Government will say, "Oh
yes, this money should go in there", but if it is not ring-fenced
it is not going to come to you, is it, unless you become agents
of the Agency?
(Mr Ashley) We need to recognise both in central
and local government that we have not given sufficient attention
to food control. It does seem to me that the events of the last
30 years and the advent of a Food Standards Agency is bringing
a change in that. I think that central government is now prepared
to face that and to fund a new approach, and local government
is now ready to do the same. I accept that there will continue
to be pressures if there is not an element of ring-fencing, but
I do think the situation and the atmosphere have changed.
866. What about your views on the way that
this extra money is going to be coming to you? If you are in an
area like mine—Gloucestershire—with districts and
the county, the districts are going to be gathering the levy which
effectively Government is saying is where the extra money is coming
from, but the county, through trading standards, are going to
get it from somewhere, and they are concerned about the fact that
it is not going to be a direct handover from the districts to
the Food Standards Agency, it is going to go back again. Can I
have your views on how you feel about one lot gathering the money
and the other lot spending it, the distribution, how effective
it is going to be and how much it is going to cost the local authorities
to collect?
(Mr Ashley) You have put your finger on an important
issue which I do not think was perhaps fully covered within the
levy consultation document. We have also identified that issue
of county and districts. Clearly, if you want to build on collection
systems and to get the advantage of that administratively, those
will be handled by districts. In Gloucestershire the individual
district councils are the obvious collection agency, they will
gather the £90. They will then retain a sum of money, which
has to be agreed, in relation to the costs of collecting that
money, and administer the register.
867. What would be your estimate of what
that would be? You are dealing with local government all the time,
you know about collecting funds. To collect £90 from one
outfit, how much are they going to retain for the bureaucracy
and the handling of that?
(Mr Ashley) I think that is a difficult judgement
to make, and I am probably not going to give you a straight answer.
868. Is it £89 or £2?
(Mr Ashley) No, it is a lot less than £89.
The figures which have been mentioned have varied from somewhere
between £15 and £23 to £25, so it is in that kind
of area. The difficulty, which is an element which you did touch
on, is that part of the promise, if you wish, or the sweetener
for local authorities in acting as a collection agency in this
way is that if they collect the levy efficiently, rather than
have larger or smaller food control needs, then it ought to be
the case that there will be some money which they will be able
to retain over and above the levy collection for spending on enhanced
food control locally. One of our problems about the consultation
document is that all of that is at the moment rather vague, and
we do need to go into detailed negotiations with government officials
about that, but we do have considerable concerns as to whether
that very much enhanced service can be delivered in that way.
Our biggest worry of all is that given that there will be variations
in local costs of collection, if you fix it at roughly a kind
of an average collection cost, logically there are going to be
quite a large number of authorities below the average, with above-average
costs, who may actually end up losing money financially in the
collection of the levy. Obviously that is of great concern to
our members.
869. What about the other option that one
way of actually being rather, shall we say, cost-effective because
of the economies of scale is that authorities club together across
borders and they say to each other, "You are pretty good
on the farm", "You become specialist on labelling",
"You become specialist on enforcement", and actually
you have a cluster or a region of authorities that specialise
in different areas to meet the raising of the standards that the
Food Standards Agency is talking about?
(Mr Cull) When you were raising the other questions
about delivery, I had written down here about co-ordination being
one of the by-products of best value. I think it will inevitably
drive authorities to say, "Could I do something in a different
way?" and one different way is to do it with somebody else
or to collaborate. I would say that certainly enforcement agencies,
enforcement authorities have got quite a good history of actually
working together. There are liaison groups certainly. Food and
environmental health authorities work together at the moment and
trading standards have 20 years worth of regional groups. I am
not saying there is not room for improvement of course, but they
have actually shared information, they have had common sampling
programmes, for example, and projects and many areas inevitably
work better than others because of individuals on them and there
is a long history of authorities working together whilst retaining
their own local autonomy and accountability.
870. I was thinking of letting go of a little
bit of the local autonomy in order to be more strategic with the
use of resources, particularly in this area, because we want to
raise standards nationally.
(Mr Cull) I think perhaps the first question you
posed at the very beginning about whether ring-fencing is the
only answer, I was going to say that if we had not got the Food
Standards Agency coming along and we were just having a discussion
about food enforcement, I suspect I would have to agree with a
lot of my colleagues and say yes, but if the circle of standards,
audit, improvement, failure works, and we must all make sure it
does work, then it should not be necessary, and it may prove me
wrong, but it should not be necessary. Local authority elected
members have not had that sort of rigour of working in that regime
before and, therefore, it has been easy to give priority to other
areas of local delivery.
(Mr Butterworth) I think there are a number of
examples throughout the country where authorities are working
together under the banner of the best value regime and on a number
of occasions a number of Midlands authorities, of which Gloucestershire
is one, have been espoused. To some extent you need the determination
and commitment of senior officers and politicians to make that
arrangement work and the inevitable conclusion of all of this
is that you might get it working well in some areas, but not in
other parts of the country and I hope that what will happen at
some stage in the future leads to an improvement on what we have
at the moment. I can cite other examples of local authorities
where I know that during the LGR, the local authority, the county,
went to new unitaries in the making and said, "You are very
small, but we have got quite a good breadth of expertise within
the authority, so is there an opportunity for creating a service-level
agreement whereby if you are content with the service, we can
develop one which meets your local needs and local aspirations,
we can re-badge it, re-logo it and we can provide that local unitary
authority service?", and the view was that that was not what
local government reorganisation was all about, one view expressed
was that "If we provide a poor service, at least it will
be our poor service and it will be us brought to account in all
of this". That is not a view I share, but it is what happens
in practice because since then, the amount of money that is invested
in training in trading standards has just withered on the vine
in recent years and yet we find ourselves in a situation where
in a shire county, like my own, for example, one of my staff will
go to a training course to deal with the new feeding stuffs responsibilities—it
is going to have a massive burden on a local authority like Devonshire—on
the same occasion a small unitary authority, sends an officer
to attend the same course. Now, we have got 10,000 farms and twelve
livestock farms and it is very important to us, but in this particular
case, one smaller authority in question have got six farms and
when I confronted my counterpart in Torbay, I said, "Would
it make sense to buy in that level of resource, skill and expertise?"
and the answer was, "Well, you know the politics of the situation".
I am afraid that we need somehow some spur to actually change
that sort of thinking because it is not in the public's interest
to approach issues like training and expertise where we have all
accepted the fact that there is not enough money and resources
in the system and we have got to make better use of it.
Mr Paterson
871. It is not clear how the FSA will relate
to other authorities at local, European or international level.
How do you see it working?
(Mr Cull) At one level of course it is increasingly
important. There is European consistency of enforcement and you
cross all areas of enforcement and that is becoming a theme which
is picked up and stressed with the UK Presidency a year ago and
it has been continued with others ever since and there are mechanisms
for doing that. There is an organisation, for example, called
Food Law Enforcement Practitioners in Europe, FLEP, which brings
together enforcement practitioners from Member States to discuss
issues, so I would have thought it was going to be increasingly
important to develop collaboration at that European level.
872. Do you think there should be more in
the Bill on this?
(Mr Cull) I had not addressed myself to that question.
I will ponder it now for a moment or two.
873. I think it is the first time we have
heard of FLEP.
(Mr Cull) There are similar sorts of fora in other
areas that bring together enforcement increasingly with the Commission
taking a role of stimulating and acting as a catalyst for those,
such as food product safety and metrology.
874. There is not time now, so could you
send a note on how FLEP works and who goes on it?
(Mr Cull) Certainly.
875. There are some changes coming up here
with the Welsh Assembly and the Scottish Parliament, so how do
you see that affecting your relationship with the FSA?
(Mr Cull) I suppose that from LACOTS' perspective,
because we have got a UK-wide remit, therefore, we are funded
by local government one way or another throughout the UK, Scotland
and Wales especially and Northern Ireland, I suppose you can see
the scope for differences and inconsistencies taking place unless
the process is managed to have some sort of UK-wide framework
because I would have thought it was in the interests of business
and, therefore, the consumer to have as much consistency about
the process at least, although I can conceive that Scotland, for
example, may want to give particular attention to a particular
social issue which may have a food aspect to it, so I can see
there is scope for some sort of inconsistency unless we work hard
the other way round.
876. Do you think that is a bad thing? Would
you like to see uniformity or would you like to see some regional
variation?
(Mr Cull) Well, I can see a reason why regional
variation might take place because politicians and so forth believe
there is a regional issue which they need to give particular attention
to which is a different issue in a different region. I suppose
I would like to see some sort of consistency of process, so we
are talking about things like auditing and base standards in interpretations,
and it seems to me that if we start to have inconsistency there,
it makes the whole job of enforcement and compliance more difficult.
877. And you think the devolved assemblies
might lead in that direction?
(Mr Cull) I think it becomes more likely than
less likely.
Chairman
878. We were talking in our earlier session
about the question of performance indicators of the Agency and
so on and I do not know if you heard, but it gets very good at
actually identifying and reporting things like food poisoning
and a lot of it is not identified and reported currently, so a
performance indicator would look pretty horrific and you could
see a growth increase in terms of statistics of food poisoning
in this country after the FSA assumes this national role, which
we assume it will do in terms of looking at food poisoning. How
do you think that your functions, local authority functions, the
performance indicators that you have now, are they likely to change?
What should the FSA be thinking of implementing in terms of what
is happening now? What should they be thinking about in terms
of getting good performance indicators in the future when we are
looking at food safety improvement being the issue and if you
have any thoughts about what indicators they should be looking
for, how does that relate to the best value we have talked about?
(Mr Stevens) For some time the public analysis
laboratories had very definite performance indicators in terms
of reporting the work that they do and the results that they produce.
This is very necessary in terms of protecting public health and
the public purse and making sure that labelling is adequately
informative. That does not achieve the end if there are not similar
indicators on the way that sampling is conducted and we look to
the FSA to give definite guidance on that.
(Mr Ashley) The Audit Commission obviously is
another body which traditionally has developed performance indicators,
but there has been a lot of criticism historically about those
which have been applied to trading standards and to environmental
health, in which the emphasis has been on inputs or process—number
of inspections, for example—which does not seem the most
important thing to measure in many respects. If you are running
a really good regime, you may well be able to do with less inspections
and more advice. The difficulty with performance indicators is
that whatever you choose, if you choose a single indicator—and
I think that is the biggest problem—there is always the
danger that there will be some perverse element relating to the
indicator. If you choose food poisoning, it is rather like crime
statistics; if the spotlight is on it for a period of time, you
may actually get a sudden increase which is basically an increase
in reporting, rather than a genuine underlying increase in the
thing you are attempting to measure. So all of these are very
well known problems about performance indicators, but babies should
not be thrown out with bath waters, because I think a regime of
performance indicators is an absolutely essential indicator of
the kind of performance indicators we want to see. I think the
trick is to make sure you have a basket of performance indicators
which measure different things in different ways, so that you
can get an overall aggregate feel for the quality of the service,
rather than relying, as the Audit Commission have done for too
long, on some very particular single indicators.
(Mr Sherwood) I think that one of the important
areas is to look at the effect which the food hygiene audit has
on the standard of the premises. It is crucial, because without
that none of us knows what improvements there are or, worse, how
places are deteriorating. There is much data available, and obviously
there is a standard scheme set out in Code of Practice Number
9. The three elements of that which would obviously need to be
looked at are those of competence in management, how the premises
complies, and what the food safety record is. The CIEH has been
doing some work looking at an average score across the premises,
and other work has been done particularly focusing on the confidence
in management score and how that is improving over the life of
the inspection regime. There are very, very complex issues there,
and I think it is an area which the Food Standards Agency, and
probably only the Food Standards Agency, can address long term
to come up with some proper standard by which we can all judge
ourselves.
879. I am quite interested in what you say,
Mr Sherwood. Mr Ashley, as I understand it, the Audit Commission
in the early 1990s found that there really ought to be some better
performance indicators, as it were. It was initially that different
levels of food premises from A to E should be visited on a regular
basis. That has now changed to say that the ones in the higher-risk
areas—A, B and C—should be visited at least twice
a year, and that the ones at the lower end should have even perhaps
a five-yearly visit. That is in the code of practice at the present
time. What is not in there—and it relates really to what
Mr Sherwood has been saying about overall improvement—is
that there is no overall indicator to say how a premises is doing
in terms of getting a premises down one on that scale. As we understand
it, somebody may be in a higher category than another premises
which is doing basically the same thing, but maybe the management
standards or training of staff or something mean that it is not
down there. Do you think that bringing premises down the risk
scale would be a good indicator for the Food Standards Agency
to look at?
(Mr Ashley) Yes, it could be. There are some problems
about absolute and relative levels. In a sense, in the same way
that the poor are always with us, you could argue that relatively
poorly performing premises or higher-level risks relatively will
always be there. The obvious aim must be in terms of outcomes
rather than inputs to effect a measurable improvement in performance.
There will always be people and there will always be premises
which will remain higher risk and lower risk, but you are quite
right, somehow we have to devise indicators which actually allow
us to help drive down and measure the fact that we have driven
down poor performance and, indeed, things like food poisoning.
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