Food: Safety

(asked on 5th June 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the need to re-establish the inspection of food from the EU at UK ports in the event of no trade deal being reached with the EU.


Answered by
Steve Brine Portrait
Steve Brine
This question was answered on 13th June 2018

The Government is preparing to negotiate our exit from the European Union, and our new relationship with the EU which aims for the freest possible trade in goods and services between the United Kingdom and the EU. This does not change the Food Standards Agency’s (FSA’s) top priority which is to ensure that food, whether imported or produced in the UK, remains safe and what it says it is.

The FSA is already working hard to ensure that the high standard of food safety and consumer protection we enjoy in this country is maintained when the UK leaves the EU. The FSA is part of a cross-Government group exploring options for future border operations, but decisions on how the UK border will operate will depend on the outcome of the negotiations.

As my Rt. hon. Friend the Prime Minister said in her Mansion House speech, the introduction of border controls on the island of Ireland would ‘be inconsistent with the commitments that both we and the EU have made in respect of Northern Ireland’. The FSA’s plans to ensure that food in the UK continues to be safe therefore do not envisage a scenario where border controls are introduced on the island of Ireland.

The FSA will strive to ensure that controls to protect public health on imported food originated from the EU are properly risk-based and proportionate, taking account of surveillance and risk assessment findings and wider Government policy on trade. Its proposed plan reflects this objective.

The FSA has already commenced a programme comprehensively to revise and upgrade its approach to surveillance. The delivery of this programme, which aims to make far better use of data collected by others and to target more effectively expenditure on sampling, will better enable potential risks and threats to be identified while also ensuring that checks on imported food are carried out on a risk-based and proportionate basis.

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