General Food Law (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019

Considered in Grand Committee

Moved by

That the Grand Committee do consider the General Food Law (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019.

My Lords, I thank noble Lords for their consideration of the draft regulations—the General Food Law (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019, the General Food Hygiene (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019, the Specific Food Hygiene (Amendment etc.) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019 and the Contaminants in Food (Amendment) (EU Exit) Regulations 2019.

The Government’s priority is to ensure that the high standards of food safety and consumer protection we enjoy in this country are maintained when the UK leaves the European Union. These instruments are crucial to meeting our objective of a functioning statute book on exit. They are made under the powers in the European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 to make necessary amendments to the overarching food regulations so that we can continue to protect public health from risks that may arise in connection with the consumption of food. These instruments correct deficiencies in those regulations.

I wish to be clear that no policy changes are made through these instruments, nor is there any intention to make any at present. These instruments propose a transfer of responsibilities to UK entities to support a UK-centric regulatory regime. Responsibilities incumbent on the European Commission are designated to Ministers in England, Wales and Scotland, and to the devolved authority in Northern Ireland.

The European Food Safety Authority, EFSA, is the EU body that provides scientific advice on food safety. These regulations designate EFSA responsibilities to the food safety authority. This will be the Food Standards Agency, the FSA, in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and Food Standards Scotland, which has a close working relationship with the FSA. The draft instruments being considered today will ensure that the following key EU regulations on food and feed safety and hygiene will function effectively on exit day.

My Lords, I thank the Minister for introducing these SIs, which replace references to the EU in regulations with references to the UK, and as such are relatively innocuous. The first question I want to ask was raised in Grand Committee last Wednesday by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, who is in his place. Is the Minister satisfied that all relevant regulations on these important food safety matters have been copied over into the SIs we are discussing today? The noble Lord found some SIs where some important matters had not been copied over. Perhaps he has spotted something which I have not in these regulations, and we will hear from him in due course.

Secondly, the general food law SI, the general food hygiene SI and the contaminants in food SI allow only one hour for a single officer in a local authority to familiarise himself or herself with the new regulations and disseminate the information to staff and stakeholders. I wonder whether it is a coincidence that they will have to do it on April Fools’ Day, the first working day after Brexit. The problem is that cuts to local authority funding have meant that some authorities no longer have any full-time food and feed officers to take charge on this issue, so who is going to do it, and who is going to pay for it? How can they do it in only one hour? Is this not just a covert way of ensuring that an impact assessment does not need to be produced? All those who responded to the consultation claimed that this cannot be done in so short a time and will certainly cost more than the Government estimate, and the Government have not offered to cover these costs. How did the Government reach the conclusion that the implementation time for businesses would be so staggeringly short?

The food hygiene SI allows a 21-month implementation period for food labelling changes from EU to GB or UK, but even here, the industry has concerns that some small businesses may struggle to comply. Other respondents to the consultation raised concerns that a common framework across the whole of the UK has not been properly addressed. The NFU pointed out that some farm holdings cross borders and animal feed moves across the Welsh and Scottish borders frequently. Is the Minister satisfied that devolution issues have been settled to the satisfaction of the Welsh and Scottish Governments?

My Lords, this is my first opportunity to welcome the Minister and congratulate her on her government appointment. I sincerely wish her well for the future.

As for interests to declare, I recently chaired an egg summit for the largest retailer in the country, which is in the register, and of course at one time, along with the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, who is in his place, I was chair of the Food Standards Agency. Before that, I was one of the last food safety Ministers, so I go back a little bit. This is my guest appearance only, at the personal invitation of my noble friends Lady Jones and Lady Smith; if the party leadership find out about it I will be in real trouble, although I can say that I am speaking for myself today since there is nobody else here from the Labour Party. I serve on Sub-Committee B of the Lords process for Brexit. We deal with all the FSA SIs as they come through. That was agreed simply because the chair is my noble friend Lord Cunningham, who was the Minister at the MAFF when we started work on setting up the FSA. I also sit on the Lords environment sub-committee. This morning we had the pleasure of having the chair of the Food Standards Agency and the Minister’s colleague, the Minister for Public Health and Primary Care, with us for an hour to discuss risk assessment and risk management post Brexit.

We are at one with these regulations. I am not going to waste the time of the Minister or of officials with details on the regulations. They provide continuity for people in terms of public health, the legal framework stays the same and there should be no problem with businesses. We were given quite good commitments in public this morning in terms of resources both for the Scottish end and the FSA, dealing with the rest of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and therefore I do not want to duplicate everything.

There is one area which the Minister and officials might want to take away for the future. There is a lot of concern about local authority performance, and in terms of inspections there is no question about that. Environmental health officers are the unsung heroes of food safety. They do the takeaways and all the bits that people do not normally think about, but that is not politically sexy for councillors, to be honest, and therefore it is one of the first things they will go for chopping. Of course, without them, in terms of managing the situation, the FSA is powerless, because of lack of information.

I am going to deal with only one issue, which I gave notice of this morning. It is an area that we might have a problem with, although I hope we do not, and I doubt that the Minister will be able to give us satisfaction on this but it will then be on the record when I am looking for the audit trail afterwards. It is RASFF, the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed in the EU. This came about in 1979 so it was not there when we joined the Common Market, as the EU then was. Its membership is 32 countries—that is, the EU and the EEA. The system is not perfect, as the chair of the FSA mentioned this morning, and no one is saying that it is. However, the fact is that it has kept us safe in terms of food safety and has made a massive contribution in the years that it has operated.

Some 46% of RASFF notifications come from the external borders of the EU—that is, border posts and entry points—relating to food. Some 3,800 alerts are issued each year, which means 10 a day are whizzing around Europe. In 2017—I want to put this bit on the record—the top 10 countries of origin that triggered notifications were: Brazil; Turkey; China; amazingly, Spain; the USA; Italy; Iran and Poland. Actually a couple of those countries were in there twice, but they are basically the top 10 from where products were discovered that needed to have the rapid alert system operated. This is detailed in RASFF’s annual report, which is easily available. I do not propose to list all the details but the issues were with poultry meat, fruit and vegetables, and fish. Lots of these incidents related to nut products; there are real issues there sometimes. This is a worldwide issue in the sense of imports to the EU from those countries that are in the top 10.

The top 10 countries in the EU that spot the issues and notify include the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, the UK—the UK is mentioned twice in the top 10 in relation to poultry meat, poultry products, nuts and so on—Spain and Italy. Those are the countries in the EU that issue the alerts. Of the 32 member countries, the UK is the fourth highest for issuing notifications. If one counts follow-up notifications, which are separately listed in the annual report, the UK is the fifth most active member of the alert system. The idea that we are just a minor functionary in this is not on. RASFF’s report shows how vital the system is to the UK and the UK’s contribution to the rest of Europe in sending these reports around to alert people. The alerts are from border inspection posts. Some are for information only, and of course some relate to fraud.

The fact is that this matter will be pretty fundamental once we are out on 29 March, whether with a deal or not. Even with a deal we will go into a transition period, but we will no longer be a member of the EU. The only countries that can be members of the RASFF system, due to its legal structure, are members of the EU or the European Economic Area, and the UK will not be in either of those.

One question has to be dealt with, although I fully accept that the Minister cannot give us an answer. The sifting committee and the EU sub-committee have repeatedly been told: “We will negotiate”, or “We are negotiating so that we can still have access to the system”. It is too late to say, “Well, we can use it later”. The clue is in the title: “rapid alert”. It is an amazing operation which has protected us over the years and one that we will no longer be in. We asked this morning about the state of the negotiations and we keep being told that Defra is negotiating. It was very unfair to ask the chief vet for Defra, who was there, but it would be really useful if we knew that genuine negotiations were going on because this is pretty vital.

If we leave with a deal, we are in the transition period. If we leave without a deal, we are out. Either way, we are out of the EU and out of this system. This is not the only alert system that operates within the European Union. There are others relating to other products, particularly on the animal side, but this is something that is incredibly serious because we import and process a huge amount of food that then gets sent around Europe for more processing. We discovered during the horsemeat situation some years ago the number of times that borders are crossed by products while they are being processed. It is my only concern and one that I think is shared by the European Union sub-committee and the sifting committee. The Minister will be aware that we produced a short note on this. It is the Achilles heel and it really ought to be dealt with before we leave, otherwise we could be high and dry with a lack of information.

My final point is that without information and openness, there are rumours. The whole point about the FSA when it was set up was to rebuild confidence in British food and to be open and transparent. If it is not, it allows rumours to start, with the risk that we will get rumours about alerts we might not be receiving. The media are not stupid; they are looking for headlines all the while. This sort of thing has to be nipped in the bud so that we do not have problems. I do not know what the answer is because once we are out, we are out. We have got something the EU want in terms of information and technology, but being out of the Rapid Alert System for Food and Feed is highly risky. In some ways it is a reason not to leave the EU, but that is for debate on another day. Whatever the Minister is able to say, it needs to be put on the record that this is incredibly serious for food safety, not just for the United Kingdom but for the rest of the EU if we are out of the system.

I add my congratulations to the noble Baroness on her appointment as the Minister in the Lords for health and social care. I would like to pick up on a point mentioned by the noble Baroness, Lady Walmsley, and to reiterate the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Rooker. I am also a member of the EU Sub-Committee on Energy and the Environment, chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Teverson. We heard evidence this morning from the Minister for Public Health and Primary Care and from Heather Hancock, the chair of the FSA. The point that I want to pin down here is the one concerning risk management because we have heard contradictory statements over the past six to nine months about who is going to be in charge of risk management after Brexit day. What we learned is that at the moment, the arrangement is that EFSA produces the risk assessment, the risk management decisions are taken by the standing committee, on which the UK is represented by the Food Standards Agency—and on only rare occasions are decisions on risk management escalated to the Council of Ministers.

Heather Hancock has proposed, and indeed has set up an equivalent arrangement for post Brexit, so there will be an equivalent of the standing committee in which the FSA on behalf of England, Wales and Northern Ireland, and Food Standards Scotland will make the risk management decisions. That is her proposal. On the other hand, we have been told on numerous occasions that Ministers intend to take risk management decisions in relation to food safety and standards, which of course would take us right back to the old days before the FSA was set up when Ministers got themselves in a tangle when confronted with having to make difficult decisions about risk management and they sometimes got them wrong. I will not go into detail, but we are all aware of the mistakes that were made in the 1990s. I would like to get confirmation from the Minister of what Steve Brine told us this morning; namely, that it is his intention—I do not believe I am putting words into his mouth—that risk management decisions on most issues will be delegated to the Food Standards Agency. I would like confirmation that that is indeed the Government’s position because we have heard contradictory points of view.

My Lords, I will make some brief comments. I too welcome the Minister to her position. I also particularly welcome the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, coming back to the Opposition Front Bench. I remember great times when he was a Defra Minister and the work he did when the climate change Bill went through.

I will raise two points that relate in many ways to what has been said by the noble Lord, Lord Krebs. Although these SIs make technical replacements to make sure that the regulations work, which I accept and understand, subject to my noble friend Lady Walmsley’s question about what has been left out, the whole crux of this comes back to how the structures that enforce and flow from these SIs will work. Is the Minister satisfied that the Food Standards Agency will be sufficiently independent of political influence when it comes to important decisions about consumer safety, food safety and agriculture? At a time of major incidents, decisions taken by Ministers can be very difficult in their effect, in particular on the food processing industry and indeed the agriculture industry.

The other area concerns our meeting with the Minister this morning at the sub-committee. I was very impressed by the chair of the FSA, Heather Hancock, and what she has achieved over time to put all the systems and people in place, but I was not convinced by the liaison between Defra and the Department for health over these negotiations. It seemed that on the question of systems the Minister was not entirely in touch—I do not mean this over-critically—with the negotiations in this area that Defra has undertaken. It is that liaison on which I would like some assurance.