Food Standards Agency

(asked on 23rd January 2024) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment she has made of the adequacy of the resources provided to the Food Standards Agency to assess food safety applications.


Answered by
Andrea Leadsom Portrait
Andrea Leadsom
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department of Health and Social Care)
This question was answered on 30th January 2024

The Food Standards Agency regularly review their resources across the teams who are responsible for delivering the regulated products service and assessing food safety applications. The teams have expanded since they took over responsibility for the delivery of the service from the European Union in January 2021. However, as highlighted in their most recent Board paper in December 2023, resource pressure remains the main risk to their delivery timetables. In the short-term they are mitigating this risk through continuous improvements that enable the current system to work more efficiently within existing resources. In the longer-term they will bring forward plans for more fundamental reform to streamline the system and reduce the burden on applicants and the regulator, without compromising food safety.

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