The chair of the Food Standards Agency says there is no immediate risk to imported food in the event of a no-deal Brexit.
Heather Hancock told the Efra select committee today that the FSA were well prepared for Brexit, having boosted capacity for food safety monitoring and regulation in the pat two years, with a 30 per cent increase in staff.
With Britain set to leave the EU this year, the UK will leave the European Food Safety Authority, despite fears that replacement food safety mechanisms are not yet in place.
Hancock said: “We’re ready for a no-deal, we have built everything that we need, trialled and tested it up and running, but we haven’t tested it at the volume that might affect us and there are still some uncertainties about the export support role we might play in support of Defra, so there are some things we re not sure about.
“One thing I would be really clear about because we do hear a lot of this in the media and commentary, is the issue of an immediate change to the risk in food safety and our judgement is there is no reason why there would be any immediate change to the risk of food entering this country.”
Hancock said the FSA has had to create a new regime “from scratch”, which she described as a “huge undertaking”.
“We will be doing a great deal more surveillance, we will be doing the risk analysis, we will be doing risk management advice, and we will be presenting advice to ministers on risk management decisions,” Hancock said.
The group, which is an independent government body, receives funding from the treasury. Hancock said that post-Brexit they would admit if they felt unable to fulfil their safety duties. “We said if we felt we couldn’t deliver we would say so publicly,” Hancock said.
She continued: “We’ve increased staff by 30 per cent. That team has built a new triage system to be more on the front foot about where risk might come from.
“A good example of this is the issue of strawberries in Australia having needles inserted with them. That came through the INFOSAN system, but we knew two days before the alerts were provided because of the triage system. By the time the news broke we had already established that none of those strawberries were in the UK.
“I think that’s a good example of us using EU exit to put ourselves in a much stronger position as a regulator in the future.”
