Food Standards Agency Summer Parliamentary Reception: 10 June 2008

Monday 16 June 2008

Speech by Deirdre Hutton, Chair, Food Standards Agency.

Good afternoon and thank you very much for taking the time out of your very busy schedules to join us.

Delighted particularly that so many MPs and members of the House of Lords have been able to join us and to see so many people here that we rely so heavily on in the course of our work.

I would like to thank Michael Jack for his introduction and thanks also to Phil Willis and Kevin Barron (who unfortunately cannot be with us this afternoon) for their very kind support in co-hosting this event. It’s a timely reminder of the importance of cross-party support for the Agency’s work and we are grateful for it.

Very good to see the former chair of the Agency, Sir John Krebs, and former Board member Baroness Valerie Howarth has also been able to join us.

I’m particularly pleased to introduce the FSA’s new Chief Executive Tim Smith who joined us recently. Tim and I share the same ambition for the Agency

• to be at the forefront of promoting safe, healthy food for the UK
• to be and efficient, economic regulator
• ensuring the best for the country – even if sometimes that means taking difficult, sometimes unpopular, decisions

I think the Agency has established its credentials as a modern, risk-based regulator. My aim is to keep us ahead of the game – using the right regulatory tools for the job, acting proportionately, and working with the grain of the market to improve food safety and make healthier eating easier for everyone – particularly those in vulnerable or disadvantaged circumstances.

Hope you may find this afternoon to be an opportunity to hear more about the progress on some of our more high profile activities: front-of-pack food labelling, saturated fat, the Meat Hygiene Service, healthy catering, Scores on the Doors.
One real success has been our salt reduction campaign which has reduced the amount of salt consumed in this country. It’s fallen from 9.5 to 9g through 'checking the label' and our work with the food industry. This alone saves 3,500 lives a year in the UK.

And an increased awareness of 6g should be the maximum daily amount of salt consumed. So we are moving in the right direction.

You will find many of my Agency colleagues here, and I hope you will take the opportunity to ask us about this exciting, literally life-changing work.

I will come shortly to the exciting part of our afternoon – the results of our Food Champion Awards. I know we have many people here eager to hear the results.

But I want now to turn to food safety which is always going to be the Agency’s top priority and challenge.

Focusing this year on food safety in the home.

I’m delighted to introduce you, this evening, to grotesque Grubeye, the 'hero' of the FSA’s new food safety campaign GermWatch which co-incides with this week’s Food Safety Week 2008.

The 'horrors' of his message are in evidence around this room.

He is now nationwide on our TVs on GMTV until the end of June. He is also appearing in all his Technicolor horror on the Life Channel TV in over 1,000 doctors’ surgeries.

GermWatch is a programme we have put together in partnership with the food industry, environmental health departments, health promotion teams, community groups and schools.

It promotes the ‘4Cs’ of good food hygiene: wash your hands to keep things Clean, Cook food properly, Chill food properly and avoid Cross contamination.

Grubeye is not a germ but appears whenever poor food hygiene practice takes place on the chopping, board, in the fridge or because of unwashed hands.

Materials around this campaign – a school activity pack, leaflets, posters, balloons and stickers – are being made available to the public. So he should continue to be a part of our lives for some time to come.

The key to this initiative, as with our other campaigns, is to give consumers clear, simple information. Information that they can act on.

This campaign is consumer based – asking people to take responsibility for their own food safety – but, of course, this is not a failsafe.

We at the FSA are vigilant about the quality of food in the food chain, and tenacious in pursuing those who put unsafe, unhealthy food onto our plates.

It should be remembered that 500 people in the UK die each year from foodborne illness and 250,000 become ill – some seriously. Resulting, in extreme cases, on children having to be put on dialysis machines.

So Grubeye has a very serious message that cannot be ignored.

I hope MPs here this evening do their bit to highlight our GermWatch campaign by sidling up to Grubeye for a photo opportunity to support this important message.

If you are an MP, can I encourage you to go over to the corner here and a member of the Agency will help you?