Food safety bosses have begun negotiations with supermarkets including Aldi and Tesco about using their data to replace the safety and hygiene regimes of cash-strapped local authorities.
The moves have begun on the back of the government’s budget announcement last month. It gave the go-ahead for a new national system to take over running of the ‘Scores on the Doors’ food hygiene ratings scheme, as well as other safety and hygiene responsibilities currently sitting with local authorities.
The government has announced all major food businesses with a “good history of compliance” and “centralised data systems” will be eligible to take part in the revolutionary new system.
The FSA said this week it planned to “move quickly” to introduce the changes and was working with stakeholders involved in the pilots to take it to the next stage.
As previously exclusively revealed by The Grocer, Aldi, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose have all taken part in early trials.
While the Treasury announcement gave the go-ahead for the massive shake-up in England, the FSA also announced this week that it was in talks with the devolved nations and hoped similar shake-ups would be carried out in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.
“We are talking to the other nations and it would be my ambition that where possible we should try to do this on a UK-wide basis,” FSA chairman Professor Susan Jebb told its board meeting in Reading this week.
“Scotland has some reform processes underway, but we’ll be talking to them to see where we can align.”
FSA chief executive Katie Pettifer described the plans as a “brilliant opportunity” for the FSA to modernise the UK’s food safety and hygiene network. However, she stressed that the agency was determined the shake-up would not lead to further cutbacks to already overstretched local authority food hygiene regimes, which it hoped would be freed up by the changes to concentrate checks on smaller, rogue operators.
“We’ve already started talking the stakeholders involved in the system who we’ve been working with.
“We are very conscious that our guiding star must be protecting public health, whilst we also have a duty to support growth.
“I’ve heard a lot of concerns about us looking at data through business and I want to stress that there will always be a need for local checks and there will always need to be an independent regulator.
“But the resourcing situation for local authorities isn’t improving. We need to ensure that this is not an excuse the diminish that further and we need to be careful not to make that system worse.”
The FSA’s latest talks also include Trading Standards teams from across the UK who will be impacted by the shake-up.
Following Rachel Reeves’ shock go-ahead in last month’s budget measures, Defra agri-food chain director Tessa Jones set out further details of who would be eligible to be involved in the new national system, in a call with industry leaders last week.
She said: “They are likely to include large companies with a history of compliance, with centralised food safety management systems and data.
“Further work will be carried out to develop that and we will also consider whether other types of large food business should be concluded as the FSA develops the proposals for government.”
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