Draft Food and Feed (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2022

Daniel Zeichner Excerpts

Monday 28th November 2022 General Committees

[Daniel Zeichner (Cambridge) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve once again with you in the Chair, Mr Sharma. It is also a pleasure to respond once again to a Health Minister, as I did in March when we debated the Food and Feed Safety (Miscellaneous Amendments and Transitional Provisions) Regulations 2022—a very similar title, with the same words, possibly in a different order. There is also possibly still much being done to correct the inevitable drafting errors and inconsistencies that have emerged in legislation.

Frankly, the draft regulations before the Committee today are a bit of a hotchpotch, tying up loose ends. You will be glad to hear, Mr Sharma, that I do not feel the need to comment on each and every one of them. I am not critical of the mistakes, because it is a huge and complicated task. I am always keen to praise the work of the Food Standards Agency—a notable achievement of the last Labour Government. It is one of the oddities of the changes introduced by the Conservatives that Health Ministers now do animal feed. I am sure that they are very happy to do so. [Interruption.] Or not—who knows?

Let us focus on the finer details of the draft regulations. The assessment is that the statutory instrument is a tidying-up exercise, as the Minister said. It generally maintains existing regulations and does not introduce new requirements. No concerns were raised by the Joint Committee on Statutory Instruments or the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee. Therefore, Members will be happy to hear that we will not oppose the draft regulations.

I cannot resist the temptation, though, to draw Members’ attention to paragraph 7.10 of the explanatory memorandum, which reads very well. It states:

“Before Implementation Period completion day, relevant EU food and feed law provided a high level of consumer protection with regard to food and feed hygiene and safety. In particular, relevant EU food and feed law set out the general principles for the safe and hygienic production of food and feed. They also prescribed effective and proportionate controls which must be applied by food business operators and feed business operators throughout the food chain, from primary production through to the sale or supply to the final consumer. It continued to apply unchanged during the Implementation Period.”

We had a really good food safety system. What was the problem? Of course, all this statutory instrument and others do is try to ensure that it continues.

The slight problem is that the world did not stop on implementation period completion day. As paragraph 7.13 of the explanatory memorandum tactfully puts it, what emerged were

“certain difficulties, especially in relation to the approval of new, or amendment of currently authorised, substances.”

I wonder whether the Minister could elaborate on some of the difficulties posed, the potential costs that they bring, and what happens in terms of trade when we operate to different standards from those of our near neighbours. The SI addresses the administrative challenge but hardly solves the problem.

The review process is described in paragraph 7.15 of the explanatory memorandum. Could the Minister clarify the circumstances under which the Food Standards Agency will be required to review the operation and effect of the regulations? If a new extraction solvent is approved in the EU, does that automatically trigger a review? Will the FSA be required to undertake additional processes to deliver on that, and if so, has an assessment been made of whether the FSA has the capacity to undertake such duties? Perhaps the Minister will tell us that the FSA will be getting additional resource. I suspect that similar questions could be asked about a number of the other changes, but I am sure that he gets my drift.

I am also intrigued—as others may well be, if they got this far through the explanatory memorandum—by the issue of the “do not eat” pictograph referenced in paragraph 7.22, which apparently we cannot use because of uncertainty over the intellectual property rights applying to ownership of the picture. That seems somewhat bizarre. There must be many similar cases of artwork of uncertain provenance. Did we ask whether we could use it, if there was uncertainty? How much would a licence have cost? It seems an odd way to proceed. If we cannot agree on joint use of an existing symbol to promote food safety, it suggests that we have problems indeed.

I am intrigued by the need to reinstate powers to extend the transitional period for the trace presence of withdrawn GMOs. As the Minister will be aware, there is considerable interest in genetic modification, and some concern that rules on imported products are not consistent with rules governing domestic production. I wonder whether he will say a little about the scale of the issue. Just how much oilseed rape with traces of withdrawn GM products are we talking about?

I cannot resist touching on qualifying edible insects, as the Minister so delicately put it. The jokes about a previous Health Secretary are just too obvious, so I shall obviously resist them, but in the interest of full disclosure, I crunched a delicious insect bar at an event in Cambridge highlighting food futures, and very good it was too. Assuming that I am interpreting the changes correctly, I am pleased that the current rules appear to be being transposed to allow edible-insect foods to continue to be developed.

I also cannot resist quoting paragraph 10.18 of the explanatory memo. Again, not all Members may have got that far, but it bears re-reading. I particularly enjoyed this languid observation:

“The remaining 251 comments were from members who did not provide comments of substance relevant to the proposals in the consultation. They either expressed a negative view or disgust on the principle of edible insects, interpreted the consultation as an intention to mislead consumers into unknowingly buying insect products and / or linked this policy to global conspiracy theories.”

Wonderful. On that positive note, I conclude my remarks.