Examination of Witnesses (Questions 660-679)
LORD WHITTY,
MR BILL
SCRIVEN AND
MR IAN
NEWTON
20 JULY 2004
Q660 Mr Jack: They do not go to the Council
of Ministers, do they?
Lord Whitty: If you will allow
me, the issue in Europe is that they are dealt with largely on
the Agriculture Council.
Q661 Mr Jack: Ah, so you are responsible
for labelling?
Lord Whitty: Our ministers are
responsible for negotiating in Europe but we are responsible on
the basis of briefs from the FSA.
Q662 Mr Jack: That sort of brings us
round full circle from my first line of questioning. When you
are deciding policy, give us a flavour as to how the policy responsibility
in government is lined up to decide what the Defra line to take
will be in the discussions in the Council of Minister on these
labelling issues. Who are the people who input to you? Who is
in charge of policy in this area?
Lord Whitty: If there is a proposition
for a new directive, for example, from Europe, which there is
currently, as you rightly say, in relation to labelling, then
the FSA are the lead department to gain the cross-departmental
view within Whitehall. So they would lead the consultation with
other government departments in Whitehall on the proposition coming
from the Commission or being proposed by the Commission. That
would be agreed. We would feed into that, as would other departments,
but we would feed into that in the light of our sponsorship and
our view on where the industry should be going and the impact,
detrimental or positive, this might have on the industry. So we
would feed into that. There would then be the normal Cabinet Office
write-round and we would hopefully reach a consensus position
which would then be taken away in detail by the FSA who would
be producing a brief so that when it actually arose it would be
FSA officials who would be in contact with the Commission officials
and by the time it reached the Council the FSA co-ordinated brief
would be the basis on which the Secretary of State, or I, or whoever
is representing us at the Council, would deal with it.
Q663 Mr Jack: Given that the process
on the new labelling regime has begun, what in summary is the
Defra input to the FSA voices-gathering exercise in government?
What is your department's view on the current line of thinking
in the Commission?
Lord Whitty: There are two or
three different dimensions to what the Commission is currently
proposing. There is the issue of nutrition and health claims.
Obviously, the Department of Health has to make a decision on
whether it is desirable to have nutritional aspects labelled in
this way, but we would then qualify that by saying: "Is it
possible, with this product, to identify quite so clearly the
nutritional value or otherwise? Is it detectable? What is the
science of the issue"—because we are, by and large,
responsible for the scientific basis of not all such claims but
of how we produce the food. I suppose, summed-up, it is the practicality
of propositions in terms of how all levels of the industry should
display the information. Our view is really on that dimension
rather than do we second-guess the Department of Health on whether
milk is good for you or not?
Q664 Mr Jack: What I am just ever so
slightly struggling with, because the input of the United Kingdom
is very important on this, is who has got the ultimate, if you
like, veto on the Government's position? The FSA gather the information,
you have just indicated that on health claims the Department of
Health has a view and then you have a view on the sort of measurability
side of these matters. The Food Standards Agency's reporting line
is to health ministers (that is who they are answerable to) and
yet you are leading, as a department, on the Council on all of
these issues.
Lord Whitty: By the time it reaches
the Council there will be a cross-government position which will
have taken into account our views on the practicality. It is not
just the measurability it is also how you label things—whether
it is a reasonable burden on the industry to provide that degree
of information, whether it is comprehensible to consumers and
whether it actually conveys the information that it is intended
to convey—and we will have views on all of those things.
There will be a cross-departmental view on that informing the
position that we take when the issue comes to Council, which is
pretty far down the process.
Q665 Mr Jack: Do you have any specialists
with Defra who guide you? Are you the minister that goes to the
Council?
Lord Whitty: Not generally, the
Secretary of State normally goes.
Q666 Mr Jack: So within Defra does she
have a group of people who are providing her with a uniquely Defra-based
perspective? If she has to go and discuss with the Secretary of
State for Health the evidence that comes from the Food Standards
Agency, I presume she must have some advice that comes from somewhere
within Defra. Is there a group which works on these matters?
Lord Whitty: Not in that sense.
The implication of such proposals coming from other government
departments or indeed from Europe for the industry, clearly, there
are experts within the department who can advise on it. There
are some areas where we are the experts. There are some areas,
like, in fact, in veterinary medicines, plant health and animal
health related issues, and some other things like quality of fresh
fruit, where we actually also are the experts, but in general
it is our view on the impact of these proposals on the industry,
which includes the impact on the industry's consumers.
Q667 Chairman: How do you avoid any discontinuity
between what is being said at official level by an independent
agency and then by ministers politically at the Council level?
It is quite an unusual situation, is it not, compared to other
areas of government responsibility, if it is an independent agency,
effectively, representing the UK at official level?
Lord Whitty: The independent agency
may or may not be accompanied by Department of Health people.
I do not think it is particularly unusual. The Environment Agency
are quite often in the same position, as are the HSE.
Q668 Joan Ruddock: I am interested to
know if the pathway by which the UK Government decided to support
0.9% contamination for GM labelling was the same. Did that begin
with the technical advice of the FSA?
Lord Whitty: The advice of the
FSA in that respect was two-fold. One: is there a safety issue
involved here and, two, is there a consumer issue involved here?
The FSA view is that provided the GM products have gone through
the process it is unlikely there is a food safety issue. Nevertheless,
on the consumer issue it is very clear that consumers want to
know whether the products contain GM or not. Our position on this
was (a) we are responsible for looking at the environmental effects
of GM in relation to crops and (b) we are responsible for seeing
whether any standards which are set are actually enforceable.
So our view was that when people were calling for a 0.1% rate,
that would not actually be enforceable because at those kinds
of levels it would be pretty difficult to detect whether it was
0.1 or 0.2, whereas at 1% or thereabouts this was eminently detectable
on current technology. So our view was, again, in relation to
the practicality of the regulations and how they would be enforced
in the industry or in the enforcers.
Q669 Joan Ruddock: I apologise for contradicting
the Minister but, of course, 0.1% is the detectable level and
it is the one that most supermarkets adopt. So as far as I understand
it, the practicality is in no way in dispute; 0.1% can be policed,
and that would be the desire of consumers. It was a very strange
decision for many consumers that the Government did go to 0.9%.
Lord Whitty: There are different
stages of being able to detect it. Clearly, if you have a boat-load
of soya landing from, say (let us not say the United States),
Brazil, which may or may not contain it, then the actual sample
you take is unlikely to be able to detect 0.1% with any degree
of accuracy. If you are talking about in single products then
it is likely to be higher, if you are talking about highly processed
goods then it is probably not detectable at all. There are different
levels of detectability, but 0.9% is not a particularly totally
robust figure, in that you are saying 0.8% is not detectable and
1% is, but it is roughly the area where for most products you
could, under existing technology, find whether there was GM presence
or not.
Q670 Joan Ruddock: Is it not a fact that
when supermarkets claim for their own products that they are "GM-free"
they are actually saying that this is a product that does not
have more than 0.1% GM in it?
Lord Whitty: That is what they
claim to say, yes, and they do that by ensuring they know the
sources and that therefore they know that their soya milk, for
example, is produced by non-GM soya farmers and they would say
that the chances of contamination are pretty unlikely. However,
when you are coming to regulate, you have to have a higher degree
of accuracy there because, if you breach the regulation, then
there is a sanction and the sanction can only really apply if
you have proof and, in general, the technical advice to us would
be that you could not get proof much below 0.9%.
Q671 Mr Drew: What consultation did the
FSA undertake before it came up with the advice that it gave to
both yourselves and the Department of Health? Did they undertake
a major consultation exercise?
Lord Whitty: Are we talking about
on the GM?
Q672 Mr Drew: Yes, on the GM.
Lord Whitty: Yes, certainly, quite
a number of times in the period up to 2003 when the regulations
were adopted, certainly in the previous two years.
Q673 Mr Drew: I think it is a fair presumption
from all the evidence that I have seen in terms of opinion polling
that the public would have wanted the lower threshold rather than
the higher threshold. Therefore, on what grounds did the FSA decide
that it was satisfactory to go for a higher threshold? I understand
that they may have actually given the advice to say, "Ministers,
there are two thresholds and here are the reasons for both of
these", but they actually came down in favour of the 0.9%
threshold.
Lord Whitty: The FSA are working
on the same basis as us, that regulations have to be enforceable.
I have no doubt that you are right, that consumers would by and
large like to know, "Is this GM or is it not?" but,
when you are making a regulation, you have to ensure that any
breach of that regulation can be proved and that the sanction
is therefore not challengeable. Some of these were joint
consultations between ourselves and the FSA, but both of us would
say that good regulation requires any breach to be detectable
or indeed compliance to be detectable and, if it is not, then
it is not good regulation.
Q674 Joan Ruddock: Is there not a proposal
for 0.5% for seeds? How is that going to be policed if it is not
possible?
Lord Whitty: Seeds are a single
product. None of this is 100% statistically accurate but it is
easier to detect out of a bag of seeds whether there is 0.5% when
they are an homogenous product than when it is a whole boatload
of soya which may well have come from several different sources
or a processed product which will include ingredients which are
from several different sources and probably from several different
countries. I may be wrong and I will check on this but I think
that 0.5% is a figure which has been included for other things/seeds
regulations.
Q675 Chairman: I think this last exchange
illustrates one of the issues which has come up a number of times
in our inquiry which is the wide range of messages that consumers
get about food and from a range of sources leading to the question
of, who should consumers trust when they are trying to reach conclusions
about what we should be eating? One of the witnesses has said
that they did not trust Government and that they were not too
keen on a number of other possible sources of advice as well.
What is your view as to how this issue should be addressed and,
more specifically, how far should Government be taking the lead
in trying to bring about reasonably clear and consistent messages
to consumers?
Lord Whitty: It is pretty clear
that they do not trust Government, they do not trust scientists
and they do not trust the agriculture sector, they do not trust
the food manufacturers and they do not even trust the newspapers.
They trust slightly more the supermarkets and that is because
they think that they offer effective assurance schemes and that,
by and large, those respectable purveyors of food—it is
not a particularly logical position—have a standard themselves
that they enforce for their own commercial interests and because
they want to serve their consumer interest well. That is why it
is so important that messages are not just regulatory messages,
that they are well beyond regulation, and that there is a degree
of consensus about what kind of messages you hope to put across
because most of the messages that impact on people would not be
the minutia of the EU labelling standards or even the actual labels
themselves, they will be the advertising, the way things are presented
in the shops, the way they are presented on menus and the way
they are presented in other literature which the industry create
and that does mean that you have to have established probably
a greater degree of consensus on these things than yet exists
and part of the process of the Public Health White Paper in food
dimensions is hopefully going to create a greater consensus around,
broadly speaking, the balanced diet approach and the information
that is needed for that can then be followed through. You are
certainly right that if you rely on the Government giving the
information, then that is not necessarily the most trusted form
of information to the consumers.
Q676 Chairman: To take one example of
how information can be presented to consumers, we have heard a
great deal of discussion, of which you will obviously be aware
also, on the possible introduction of a traffic light system of
labelling. What is the view within Defra on this at the moment?
Lord Whitty: There are some difficulties
about the traffic light system. Tesco have adopted it; I think
it is a useful initiative and we ought to see how well it works
in both senses as to how much information they can convey through
it and what the actual consumer behaviour in response to that
is. So, whilst we are not sponsoring what Tesco are doing, we
do think it is a very useful attempt to try and convey information
in a way which is more understandable than perhaps historically
we have managed.
Q677 Chairman: How far can this be done
on a consensus basis and a voluntary basis amongst the retailers
for example because again one of the pieces of evidence that we
have had has pointed out that, if there was an inconsistency in
message, then consumers would not understand the message when
it came from different quarters? So, if it is going to work, there
have to be schemes, be it traffic light or anything else, which
apply across large parts of the sector. Is that not one where
there is a role for Government?
Lord Whitty: I would agree with
you but there are admissions against this. Even on five a day,
the supermarkets have tended to try and present it in slightly
different ways in their own slogans. Now, that is the market.
As long as broadly speaking they are doing the same message, then
it is not too bad but, if we were to introduce an across-the-board
traffic light system, it would be necessary that all retailers
had pretty much the same kind of concept of what the traffic lights
meant and, if you try and do that without regulation, it is actually
quite difficult because one can get it at Tesco at the moment
and presumably one can see a competitive advantage in them being
the traffic light merchants for the moment. If we were to regulate
on it, we would have to be much more specific. The other way of
getting it across the board, particularly in relation to fresh
produce, is assurance schemes where there is some progress made
in terms of the red tractor and other indications of assurance.
At the moment, the assurance that the consumers by and large trust
most is the very fact that it is on the big supermarket shelves
because they think that actually of itself conveys assurance,
but there are substantial areas where assurance schemes could
play a bigger role in raising public awareness about the safety
of food, particularly maybe in the dietary effect of it.
Q678 Chairman: Whether it is a traffic
light system or another form of labelling standard or whether
it is assurance schemes, should there not be a role for Government
to be taking the lead in trying to bring about those standards,
be it by a regulatory—
Lord Whitty: If it is regulatory,
it would have to be an EU body and of course one of the options
under the current EU discussions is whether there should be an
EU traffic light scheme or at least an EU green light system.
In terms of providing information, clearly the FSA would be in
the lead here but the FSA are in a position and it is part of
their mandate to produce information and guidance to everybody
in the food trade as to how they should convey information about
their food, so there is a Government educative and advisory role,
if you like.
Q679 Mr Jack: Does Defra think that traffic
lights are good or bad?
Lord Whitty: There is not an answer
to that. We think that greater clarity of message would be helpful.
If the traffic light system can convey that accurately and people
respond to it, then they are good.
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