Food Allergens

Baroness McIntosh of Pickering Excerpts

Thursday 26th June 2025 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

I applaud my noble friend for her dedication and passionate advocacy on this issue. As she said, we published the best practice guidance in March this year and, as noble Lords will appreciate, any new guidance requires time to embed and be adopted by businesses. We hope to carry out an evaluation one year after the implementation of the guidance to assess both its uptake and its impact, and to better inform Ministers on the need for any potential legislation. This means that our evaluation work is likely to begin in spring 2026, and the gap between the launch and when the impact of the guidance can be meaningfully assessed ensures that our evaluation is based on a representative and reliable picture of how the guidance is actually working in practice. This will be very helpful in our understanding of the need for and any potential impact of any future legislative options. We very much welcome the opportunity to meet and to review the new research, which we have not yet had sight of. It would be invaluable to examine these findings alongside the FSA’s research in this area.

[Baroness McIntosh of Pickering (Con)]

My Lords, although the guidelines are very welcome, and I applaud the Food Standards Agency’s work in this area, does the Minister share my concern about whether local authorities have the resources to do the necessary work to visit the establishments concerned to ensure that the guidelines are being applied? I think most restaurants in my area ask whether you are allergic. Does she also share my concern about the increasing amount of passing off of one food substance as another? We had the horsemeat scandal some 12 years ago, and we do not want to see a repeat of that.

[Baroness Hayman of Ullock (Lab)]

I agree with the noble Baroness that we absolutely do not want to see a repeat of that. As she says, local authorities enforce allergen rules, typically via trading standards and environmental health officers. The number of trading standards officers has dropped, although staffing rose slightly in 2023, so we are looking at how we can improve that. The FSA has backed a level 6 trading standards apprenticeship, for example, and is training over 100 new officers in one year. The FSA will continue to monitor that, and will continue to support training guidance and the food law code of practice with local authorities.