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Reinventing Food Safety Regulation

Posted on: Monday, 26 September 2005, 18:00 CDT

By Podger, Geoffrey

ABSTRACT

As a result of the 1996 BSE crisis, confidence was lost in food safety regulation, resulting in the introduction of food safety agencies in the UK and Europe. The setting up of the UK Food Standards Agency and its European counterpart, the European Food Safety Authority, was not without difficulties and complications. This article outlines the changes that resulted from the introduction of these agencies and their consequences.

The Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE) crisis was a disaster in terms of human suffering, animal health and welfare, and resulted in a huge cost to the economy. It also led to an unprecedented collapse in confidence in the national food safety authority in the UK.

In the UK and the European Union (EU) this did at least have something of a silver lining, in that it led to a comprehensive reassessment of how food safety should be dealt with, and by whom.

The purpose of this article is to give an overview of the changes that were introduced, their value and the perhaps inevitable difficulties and complications to which they themselves may now be giving rise.

Perspective

I should explain my own perspectives so that readers can adjust their perceptions to correct for unintended bias of my part.

I had been working in the Department of Health (DH) since 1981 as a manager dealing with public health issues but not, significantly as it turned out, with food safety. My perceptions of the UK crisis in early 1996 were therefore very much of the anxiety of my colleagues who struggled with the exceptionally difficult problem of presenting a scientific volte-face to the UK public and Parliament - and of course more widely to the EU and the world beyond.

Late 1996 I was asked to take over responsibility for the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (MAFF) Food Safety and Science Group, and two years later was given responsibility for the combined food safety staff of MAFF and DH. In 2000, after an open competition, I became Chief Executive of the newly created Food Standards Agency (FSA) in the UK. In 2003, after another such competition, I took over as the first Director of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA). So from August 1996 onwards, there is clearly much I can be blamed for!

Repercussions

The events of 1996 had repercussions on each of the component parts of the food safety trilogy; risk assessment, risk management and risk communication. In all cases what was challenged was not simply what had happened in relation to BSE, but the very nature of the institutions which had exercised responsibility. Interestingly, the challenge came equally from non-Governmental organisations (NGOs) and consumer organisations on the one hand, and the food industry on the other. I propose to look at the nature of their criticism and in turn the responses made in each of the three risk areas.

Risk assessment

Risk assessment - that is, the scientific characterisation of risk - was an obvious point of attack, given general public feeling that the 'scientists had got it wrong'. In my view this was something of an unfair criticism; the truth was rather that both BSE and variant Creutzfeld-Jakob disease (vCJD) had characteristics that could not have been inferred at the outset, that very sensible precautionary measures had been recommended by scientists against precisely the possibility that this might prove to be the case, and that the scientists in early 1996 had shown considerable courage in publicly reversing their previous advice, knowing full well that public opinion was likely to be unforgiving.

Nevertheless it was clear to many that the process of how scientific advice should be obtained, from whom and with what, if any, level of stakeholder involvement, did need to be looked at again. The Government's scientific committees had, fairly or unfairly, the reputation, at least to their critics, of acting as government 'wheeler dealers', cut off from critical comment or alternative views. In the UK much excellent work was done by Lord May, the Government's then Chief Scientific Adviser, in setting out the standards for obtaining scientific advice. It is worth noting that they often embodied existing best practice in Whitehall.

In addition, the food safety part of government led the way in suggesting that lay people might also be part of the food safety committees. While it is probably fair to say that government scientists themselves were fairly sceptical, although not necessarily hostile, about this, the need to make a dramatic break with the past won the day. Interestingly the scientists themselves appear to have been as convinced as the lay members and their supporters of the value of this change. The committees found that lay members were particularly useful in ensuring that the real questions were addressed, in terms meaningful to the consumer. Individual lay members were more than happy to defend their scientific colleagues from unjustified attacks - a quite unexpected bonus. I personally think it was this development that helped everyone get past the idea that 'science is only for scientists'; lay members showed an ability to participate in the debate and properly influence it on occasion, without in anyway having the level of scientific distinction of the other committee members. Interestingly, at EU level, the greatest opposition to such changes has come from some of the EU consumer organisations themselves, which see this process as a confusion of roles. There is certainly no consensus for its introduction.

Risk management

It was probably on risk managers rather than scientists that the critical spotlight was most focused after the BSE crisis. They were suspected, fairly or unfairly, of having been in the pockets of industry and were held responsible for the evident shortfalls in implementing scientific advice on precautionary measures. Their value as trusted communicators to the public was lost, and it would prove difficult for them to carry the public with them in the future, even where their messages were very much accurate and in the public interest.

The general diagnosis was that the failure was institutional rather than just personal. (From my own experience I have to say having known all the major players in the pre-1996 drama, I can think of none whom I would regard as personally culpable.) It was, perhaps, unreasonable to expect public servants, however dedicated, to represent at the same time the commercial needs of industry and the protection of the consumer. There was also a feeling, whether justified or not, that food safety decisions and politics did not mix very well, although this was rightly tempered by a desire that this key area of public interest and concern should not be removed from democratic accountability.

Other models of risk management were therefore sought. In the UK, the Meat Hygiene Service had already been formed from the previously localauthority employed staff to try and bring a more consistent and effective approach to meat inspection. But the major demand, not least in looking to what had already been achieved in countries such as Sweden, was for independent national food administration or agencies to be created.

The result was that all over Europe national food safety agencies were created, although this was not universally true (Italy, for example). The agencies divided into two main models: those that dealt solely with risk assessment (for example, France, Germany and indeed EFSA itself), and those that combined risk assessment with risk management (for example, the UK, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands and Greece).

The risk management agencies were confronted with peculiar opportunities and challenges, and it is with them that I should like to deal first, particularly from a UK viewpoint. I shall come back to the role of the risk assessment agencies when addressing the subject of risk communication.

The UK FSA came into being in April 2000, and was immediately confronted with understandably high expectations that it would bring about a real and significant shift in culture. At the same time it remained a government body, its chairman was appointed by ministers (the eminent zoologist Sir John Krebs FRS being the first holder of the office), and it depended entirely on ministers for the making of regulations.

From the start, the new UK agency made significant changes in process. It announced, to some surprise and indeed alarm in certain industry quarters, that all its policy discussions would be held in public. This was subsequently amplified by holding public consultations and stakeholder meetings on key issues (mainly BSE- related) before policy issues were brought to the board for public discussion. In other words, for the first time in this area a relevant cross-section of stakeholders were involved in policy development and the decisions by the UK FSA's board occurred in public with contrary views and doubts fully expressed. Much to the surprise (and perhaps disappointment?) of more traditionalist onlookers, the roof did not fall in! Indeed the system seemed to justify itself not only by its transparency but also because holders of different shades of opinion begin to see each others' points of view, and well base\d consensuses began to emerge.

Risk communication

The third major issue raised by the BSE crisis was that of risk communication. This had never been an easy area for public authorities, which were regarded with a healthy degree of scepticism by consumers, and became all the more difficult once a major volte face had to be admitted. Indeed, external supporters could no longer be found for government communications, however well funded. The response to this was twofold. First, it was at last recognised that what the public wanted was to be told the truth, not to be patronised or mollycoddled. This in itself required a major change of emphasis away from traditional departmental attitudes, very much based on a view that the public needed to be constantly 'reassured', for fear that otherwise they would certainly 'panic'. The undoubted fact that ordinary people cope perfectly well with levels of anxiety and uncertainty well beyond anything lurking in the food chain was missed completely.

Post-1996, however, the language of communication changed. The public began to be told that there was no such thing as zero risk, that scientific advice was no more than the best that could be given in the circumstances and would be revised if new facts come to light, and that science could not provide all answers to all questions - rather hilariously, as the general public had long been aware of all these points. The general result was, quite properly, to make government statements on food safety set in this context more credible rather than less. The involvement of other players in policy-making also had the effect of making their public support for the resulting government communicators a powerful factor in enhancing credibility.

While this was going on, much effort was being made by agencies throughout Europe to increase the professional competence of their communicators. This was achieved by bringing in external experts (the FSA, for example, recruited its Director of Communications, Neil Martinson, from the BBC), giving expert training to those who would be involved, and making a serious effort to find the right communicators for the right message. Thus most agencies moved to the model of allowing chosen experts to appear directly in the media rather than have their advice presented by ministers, as had happened in the past. Finally, there was a greater degree of robustness in countering media stories which, for whatever reason, were ill founded - a necessary function in my view, as national and international agencies exist as much as to protect the public from scaremongering as they do to identify and tackle significant risks to our health.

For risk assessment agencies, the problem of risk communication was to cause a particular problem, perhaps unforeseen by their inventors. Consumers, when learning of a particular risk, understandably wish not merely to be told of its scientific nature, but also what precautions, if any, they should personally take and what action those in authority intend to take. Merely to characterise a risk without going further would not fully meet the public's need for information, and possibly spread more alarm than would be the case if the remaining questions were answered in parallel. Hence where risk assessment and risk management had been separated for perfectly good reason, the challenge for risk communication was to 'put the jigsaw back together', to fully meet the needs of consumers. This remains a tricky issue since it entails preserving the independence of the bodies concerned, on the one hand, while getting them to combine in time in the public interest on the most sensitive of issues.

New issues

Although these reforms are new and still ongoing, they inevitably bring new questions and issues in their wake. The greatest of these is, perhaps, that of accountability. Just where does these buck now stop, particularly when things appear to go wrong? Certainly there has been a fear in some political circles that creating independent agencies is simply to give them the harlot's prerogative of 'power without responsibility'. Even if all agencies are subject to parliamentary scrutiny and ministers are ultimately the law makers, isn't the truth, the argument goes, that by the time food agencies have identified the risk and produced a preferred policy option favoured by stakeholders, the democratic institutions have little option but to accept it? The answer seems to me to lie in the following points:

1 The purpose of food agencies is to establish the best position of contemporary science on an issue.

2 Judging the acceptability of policy options to stakeholders is a proper component of policymaking.

3 While 1 and 2 may, and arguably should, have a limiting effort on the options realistically available to the democratic institutions, they in no way prevent the democratic institutions from probing their arguments, testing their proposals and rightly preserving themselves the final decision which properly should include unscientific factors like 'public acceptability'.

In other words, it seems to me that the post-BSE reforms should have the effect of strengthening the role of democratic institutions in food policy making. Certainly they should not be undermined. Similarly, the individual consumer should be better empowered through having more information with which to make their own decisions, and judge those of the 'powers that be'. Like most things in life these improvements will only be sustained if the food agencies themselves, at European, national or lower levels, accept that is their responsibility to act with a high level of integrity , industry and competence. We have to meet that challenge day in, day out.

Geoffrey Podger outlines the changes introduced into European food safety policy in light of the BSE crisis along with the difficulties encountered

Geoffrey Podger took up office as the first Executive Director of the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in February 2003. Mr. Podger was previously Chief Executive of the UK Food Standards Agency (FSA), which was established in April 2000 to bring about increased transparency and consumer involvement in food safety and related matters. Geoffrey Podger has been a UK civil servant since graduating from Oxford University in 1974. He has been mainly concerned with public health matters and has worked extensively for the Department of Health in London. He became a Companion of the Order of the Bath (a British decoration for public services) in January 2003.

Contact: geoffrey.podger@efsa.eu.int

Copyright Association for Consumers Research Jul/Aug 2005

Source: Consumer Policy Review

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