Food: Safety

(asked on 15th March 2018) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what access consumers will have to food safety data collected by food companies and third party contractors and submitted to the Food Standards Agency.


Answered by
Lord O'Shaughnessy Portrait
Lord O'Shaughnessy
This question was answered on 29th March 2018

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is at a very early stage in developing the arrangements for the use of regulated private assurance within the delivery model. The details regarding what industry data will be required and how this will be accessed are still to be worked out.

The FSA believes that the interests of the consumer will be best served by a regulatory regime in which food businesses feel confident to share data with the FSA in confidence, rather than by the routine publication of all and any data available. There is a balance to be struck between the FSA’s commitment to transparency with regards to data, and considerations of commercial confidentiality. If the industry is confident that the FSA will not put commercially confidential information into the public domain then it is more likely it will be willing to share its relevant assurance data with the FSA and local authorities. However, if the FSA were to be given information that suggested public health was at risk, it would make this available notwithstanding any considerations of commercial confidentiality.

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