Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether additional resources have been allocated to (a) the Food Standards Agency and (b) local authorities to allow the inspection of commercial third party assurance providers.

No additional resource has been provided to the Food Standards Agency (FSA) or local authorities for this purpose.

The FSA does intend to make use of data from commercial third party assurance providers in the new delivery model that is being developed under the FSA’s Regulating Our Future Programme. This would not require inspection of assurance providers.

The FSA will set the standard for data from such assurance providers to be considered eligible to be taken into consideration to inform the official controls regime required by the FSA and local authorities. It is only when it has been demonstrated that the standard has been met that the data will be taken into consideration.