Environment, Food and Rural Affairs CommitteeWritten evidence submitted by the Association of Public Analysts

Introduction

1. The Association of Public Analysts (APA) represents the professional interests of public analysts. Formed in 1953, the APA is the successor to the Society of Public Analysts which dates back to 1874.

2. Food authorities1 must appoint at least one public analyst under The Food Safety Act 1990 to analyse samples of food for compliance with legislation relating to safety and standards and report on their findings. Uniquely, a Food Safety Act Certificate is sufficient evidence of the facts stated in it unless its author is specifically required to be called as a witness.

3. Public analysts must hold the Mastership in Chemical Analysis (MChemA), a competence based postgraduate qualification awarded by the Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC). Public analysts are also members or fellows of the RSC.

Funding of Official Controls on Food

4. The Food Safety Act 1990, Regulations made under this Act and EU Regulations lay down the responsibilities of food businesses and enforcement authorities.

5. The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is the competent authority in the UK within the meaning of EC Regulation 882/2004 on official controls performed to ensure the verification of compliance with feed and food law, animal health and animal welfare rules. The delivery of many official controls is delegated to local authorities.2

6. The bulk of funding for official controls is provided by central government to local authorities via the Revenue Support Grant (RSG). The funding is not ring-fenced and each authority will decide on the basis of local priorities how much funding to allocate to official controls. Often the local funding for official controls may be held in a budget covering other areas and it is difficult to ascertain exactly what resources are actually allocated to official controls.

7. The FSA has made separate direct funding available to local authorities in the last few years. This has consisted of £1–2 million per annum which local authorities or consortia of local authorities can bid for. The FSA specifies exactly what sampling and analysis it requires. The bulk of the funding covers analysis costs with the remainder used to cover costs of sampling (sample purchase and officer time and travel). The FSA has always made it clear that this separate funding should be used to supplement existing sampling budgets, but it is used by some local authorities to partially or entirely replace their own sampling budgets.

8. Enforcement powers are held by local authority officers, usually Trading Standards or Environmental Health. Under the Food Law Code of Practice each food authority is required to produce an annual service plan for enforcement of food standards. This should be prepared in conjunction with the authority’s appointed public analyst and contain details of risk assessment of food businesses, numbers of inspections to be carried out and details of samples to be taken. The code of practice does not specify a minimum sampling rate of any kind.

Official Control Laboratories

9. All food samples taken in the course of official controls must be submitted to either a food examiner for microbiological examination or to a public analyst for chemical analysis. In England there is a centralised network of laboratories for food examination work which is part of the Health Protection Agency3 (HPA). The HPA’s activities in this area are centrally funded and coordinated. Their services are free at the point of use to local authorities through a system of credits.

10. Public analysts, on the other hand, do not work in a centralised laboratory system but are employed by a number of public and private laboratories who decide to offer public analyst services to local authorities. There are currently eighteen laboratories in the UK, ten in England, four in Scotland, three in Wales and one in Northern Ireland. Eleven of the laboratories are provided by individual local authorities. These laboratories have not been immune to cuts in their operational budgets and four laboratories have closed in England alone since 2011 (Bristol, Durham, Leicestershire and Somerset4). This has led to highly qualified and experienced analysts being made redundant.

11. The remaining public sector laboratories have seen a reduction in the income received for testing from their own and other local authorities. The majority of local authorities, who do not have their own laboratory, generally go out to tender every three to five years. This, together with the year on year reductions in budgets for analysis, has resulted in fierce competition for contracts and in an inability to make the medium to long term investments in instrumentation and new technology to ensure laboratories are able to respond to emerging risks and food contamination issues.

12. There are two private sector providers, Public Analyst Scientific Services Ltd, a subsidiary of the multinational life sciences group Eurofins, which runs four of the UK laboratories and Minton, Treharne and Davies, which run two of the three Welsh laboratories.

Horse DNA Testing Capacity

13. Of the eighteen laboratories currently operating only six are equipped to analyse samples for horse DNA. The other laboratories either do not have the required instrumentation or do not have expertise in this field. As most laboratories are required to be run as businesses (including local authority laboratories), unless the establishment of a particular methodology such as DNA analysis and the accompanying investment required is considered to be economically viable, ie the laboratory will receive sufficient samples to cover the costs, then the laboratory will not develop the methodology.

14. This leaves the United Kingdom enforcement system in a vulnerable position as the country’s testing capacity is effectively left to market forces. When demand for testing is low, as in the current climate of reducing local authority budgets, suitably qualified staff and facilities are lost to the system and cannot easily be retrieved when the demand for analysis increases.

15. The horse meat incident has highlighted this problem. Laboratories were not previously being asked to test for horse and validated methodology was either dormant or non-existent as no mechanism exists to provide any base level of capability or capacity to respond to major incidents. The ability to react to the sudden influx of samples and the urgency of the reporting requirements has demonstrated the shortcomings of the system and led to capacity issues within the laboratories.

March 2013