MONITORING OF ENFORCEMENT ACTION (Hansard, 22 July 1999)

§ Mr. Paice
I beg to move amendment No. 3, in page 6, line 21, at end insert— '(6) In any case where the Agency itself or a body for which it is accountable is the enforcement authority, subsection (1) shall not have effect and the function of monitoring enforcement shall be held by the Secretary of State.'.

Mr. Deputy Speaker
With this, it will be convenient to discuss the following amendments: No. 9, in schedule 3, page 27, line 27, leave out from beginning to 'and' in line 28.
No. 18, in schedule 4, page 32, line 35, leave out from 'omitted' to end of line 37.

§ Mr. Paice
The Minister of State suggested that we might not reach this group of amendments, but I am 1451 pleased that we have, as it enables us primarily to discuss the Meat Hygiene Service. I shall not take a long time rehearsing the arguments because we spent some time on the matter in Committee. However, I have taken the opportunity to look again at what the Minister said in reply to that debate, and I have tried to address the issue in amendments Nos. 3 and 9. I shall come to amendment No. 18 in a moment.
Amendment No. 3 turns on its head the approach that the Opposition previously adopted. which was to prevent the FSA taking over the MHS. The reason we do not want the two to be in cahoots is quite clear. We want a clear distinction between enforcement and the monitoring of that enforcement. We recognise that there will be times, in extremis, when the FSA will have to take on enforcement measures—if, for example, another authority fails in its duties; that is in the Bill and we accept it—but to take it on in that situation for, one assumes, a temporary period, is different from its being part and parcel of the agency's usual functions.
In Committee, the Minister clearly said: The chief executive"— of the MHS— does not create policy; he receives policy instructions from MAFF. Likewise, he will receive them from the FSA staff'. That clearly indicates to me that there is a problem.
The Minister went on to refer to the idea of the FSA being born out of the suspicion that the Ministry should not ride two horses and the paradox of a regulatory Ministry sponsoring the food and the farming industries. I accept that in the way in which he said it, but that paradox applies equally to the idea of the FSA setting some regulations, enforcing them through the MHS and then monitoring their enforcement.
There are not many other walks of public life in which both the enforcement and the monitoring of the effectiveness of that enforcement are done by the same body.

§ Mr. Rooker
There is not much time to put this on the record, but the auditing of the MHS goes beyond the FSA. The EU Commission's Food and Veterinary Office and the state veterinary service, which is not part of the FSA, will all be involved in this function.

§ Mr. Paice
The Minister makes precisely my next point. In Committee, he said: the MHS is accountable to EU inspectors, who can arrive with no warning. The inspections will be audited by the state veterinary service as well as by the veterinary public health unit of the joint food safety and standards group".—[Official Report, Standing Committee B, 13 July 1999; c. 299–300.] If all those bodies monitor the MHS, why on earth do we need the FSA as well?

§ Mr. Rooker
rose—

§ Mr. Paice
I shall give the Minister time to reply; he does not need to intervene.
I do not understand why it is necessary for the FSA to fulfil that role. The Minister worried members of the Committee when he said that the Government were still 1452 exploring the management arrangements between the FSA and the MHS. He spoke about Chinese walls of separation. We are not at all convinced that they will be as effective as they ought to be.
Amendment No. 9 was effectively given to us by the Government in Committee when the Minister pointed out the implications of another amendment that I had tabled. He now has two opportunities to accept our argument in two different ways. If the Government are obsessed with pursuing the idea of putting the MHS with the FSA, they can do so as long as they leave the monitoring of enforcement with MAFF and with those other bodies to which he has referred. Amendment No. 3 would allow them to do that.
Amendment No. 18, which relates to schedule 4, is designed to control the overweening power of the agency. The Minister for Public Health, who seems to have evaporated from the Front Bench, said that we have spent a lot of time talking about the independence of the agency. She is quite right: there is no contradiction between seeking to establish an independent agency and ensuring that it does not have excessive power. That amendment is designed to ensure that, in at least one area, the agency's power would be constrained. It would not be given the powers that Ministers have under the Food Safety Act 1990.
Other brief contributions may be made, but I am sure that the Minister will have a moment or two to reply before we run out of time.

§ Dr. Brand
The hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire (Mr. Paice) has told us that he was riding two horses; I believe he has jumped on the wrong one.
We have supported the Conservatives in their contention that it is not appropriate to site the Meat Hygiene Service with the Food Standards Agency because its size is disproportionate to that of the agency, but I firmly believe that the FSA ought to have a role in monitoring and policy setting for all the enforcement agencies. If the FSA had been in existence a few years ago and had done the job properly, the MHS would never have had to be set up. It would not have to be taken away from local authorities because there would have been a mechanism in place for intervention, short of the nuclear option, as described by the Minister, of direct ministerial intervention. We cannot support the amendment because it takes the wrong direction.
In time, if not tonight, I hope that the Minister will be able to describe how he has worked through the concept of separating the policy-setting function of the agency and the semi-autonomous role of the MHS in the execution of that function.
It is absolutely vital that the FSA sets clear criteria for what it considers to be failure by an enforcement authority. It would be quite wrong for it to have powers that could be applied quite arbitrarily to, for example, a local standards agency or other enforcement agencies that are under local authority control. The criteria on performance must be clear, and one would expect warning systems so that an agency does not suddenly come down like a ton of bricks on an unsuspecting small district council that does not realise that it is under-performing.
1453 We cannot support the amendment although the spirit behind it was right, separating the Meat Hygiene Service from the Food Standards Agency. The hon. Member for South-East Cambridgeshire has taken the wrong horse of the two that he might have taken.

§ Mr. Rooker
I should like to make a serious attempt to respond to the debate. This is one of the most important groups of amendments, which we started on, if I recall correctly, at 8 o'clock. [Interruption.] Oh, the hon. Member for New Forest, West (Mr. Swayne) is back. We have had the debates without him and made reasonable progress.
There is no way I can do justice to the issue, which is important. I do not criticise the Opposition for raising their concerns, but I can make only general, rather than specific, comments.
The prime reason for the Meat Hygiene Service and, indeed, the Dairy Hygiene Service being, effectively, an integral part of the agency is that they are 100 per cent. concerned with food safety, whereas the other agencies under MAFF, including the Veterinary Medicines Directorate and the Pesticides Safety Directorate, are not exclusively related to food safety. They are out. They will remain as executive agencies, but with all the links to the agency.

§ Mr. Gill
Will the Minister give way?

§ Mr. Rooker
No.
The other thing that I want to make clear—I have lost count of how many times I said it in Committee, but it has to be said so that it is taken on board by those who look at our proceedings—is that there are no plans or agenda to create a national enforcement authority. That is the position. The Bill does not allow one to be set up. One could argue that if a local authority failed in its enforcement duties the powers are in the Bill to have that dealt with. That is not envisaged. It is not part of any hidden agenda, whatever anyone might say about how the Meat Hygiene Service was formed in the first place.
In Committee I discovered that, in some quarters, there is an abiding hatred of the Meat Hygiene Service. As someone said a couple of days ago, there is a romantic attachment to the good old days, when 300 separate local authorities checked the abattoirs. At that time, there were 900 abattoirs. We inherited only 300—a few closed in the 18 years of Tory rule.
As we saw in the public hearings of the Phillips inquiry, during those halcyon, romantic days of local authorities checking meat hygiene in abattoirs, there was an abject breakdown in the controls, which led to BSE infectivity going into the food chain, so it is not true that things were 100 per cent. perfect when 300 local authorities were dealing with the matter.
With hindsight, I accept that the actions of the previous Government in setting up the Meat Hygiene Service were totally correct. There are no plans to devolve it back. Nevertheless, there is no agenda to take local authorities' role at any level—that of environmental health officers or trading standards officers. They are the front-line police throughout the food chain. We want to work in partnership with them. That is the way in which the Bill has been set up.
1454 We will make separate arrangements for the management reporting of the Meat Hygiene Service within the Foods Standards Agency and for the audit. I am convinced that we can do that. If it can be done in the private sector, with audit companies both carrying out internal and external audits of their clients and maintaining Chinese walls, we can do it here. If I had had more time, I could have put on the record some of the management mechanisms that we propose to introduce, but perhaps that can be done in another place.
The genuine concerns that have been raised have been met by the content of the Bill and the way in which we intend the structures to operate in practice. There is still some work to do, but there are a few months in which to do it.