Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how much funding was provided to the Food Standards Agency’s National Food Crime Unit in each of the last five years.
The Food Standards Agency (FSA) National Food Crime Unit (NFCU) works to prevent, detect and investigate fraud within our food system. The NFCU was initially established as an intelligence function in 2015 following recommendations made to Government in the Elliott Review, conducted in the aftermath of the horse meat incident in 2013. An independent review into the NFCU in 2018 recommended that the NFCU expand to provide an investigative capability.
The following table shows the funding provided to the NFCU from 2018 to 2023.
Year | Funding |
2018/19 | £3.2 million |
2019/20 | £5.6 million |
2020/21 | £4.6 million |
2021/22 | £4.7 million |
2022/23 | £5.0 million |