Scottish Food Advisory Committee – April 2009

The Committee discussed the recently released FSA Strategy Consultation. In their proposals for the Agency's new strategy, they describe the main areas where they intend to focus their work over the period 2010 to 2015. These are built around the Agency's core purpose of safe food and healthy eating for all.

One of the tests of any new strategic plan is that it can be easily and effectively communicated to anyone, outside the organisation as well as within it. The main difference from the current strategic plan is the introduction of a set of outcomes.

SFMTA might want to respond to this consultation (deadline 5th June) in particular over BSE controls and vertebral column removal. E coliO157 controls would also be of interest since we do not want butchers perpetually blamed for every e coli outbreak.

The meeting also considered action being taken in response to the report of the E.coli public Inquiry established to investigate the outbreak of E.coli O157 in Wales in 2005.

A programme of work will be developed and progressed to deliver the outcomes. However, FSA see six main themes emerging on which outcomes will be set and measured:
• uptake of HACCP based procedures by FBOs;
• knowledge, training and skills of enforcement officials;
• consistent and appropriate risk based enforcement;
• audit and monitoring of enforcement;
• evaluation to ensure programme objectives of securing public health
protection are met; and
• improving our understanding of the science.

The third item debated in depth was the GO Science Review that looks at how FSA take scientific advice and base their decisions on its conclusions. SFMTA will write to Alisdair Wotherspoon of the Chief Scientific team expressing its disappointment that emotion rather than science had been at the heart of a decision in late 2008 to prevent butchers from removing vertebral column from carcases of beef animals aged between 30m and 48m.