Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, for what purposes the Food Standards Agency has used artificial intelligence in the last 12 months.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is at the heart of the Government’s plan to kickstart an era of economic growth, transform how we deliver public services, and boost living standards for working people across the country.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) is using AI, both traditional and generative, for a range of purposes. Using traditional AI, we have focused on pattern detection for food risk identification using, and developing, approaches to extract and structure information contained in documents, from shipping manifests to webpages. We aim to see food safety and authenticity risks before the food lands on the United Kingdom’s shores.

For generative AI, we are piloting its use in our front-line services in the field by using mobile based AI applications. The goal of this is to streamline our inspection of meat businesses by having AI help collate notes during the inspection process, which will allow uniformity in reporting and improve data quality. We aim for this to improve the existing method, which involves inspectors carrying large amounts of equipment while taking written, paper-based, observations.

We have also deployed generative AI tools to improve data quality. As most data from national and international food alert systems is unstructured text, considerable human effort has been required to extract the relevant information and then categorise it to a standardised format. The aim is to reduce the manual work required in improving data quality, which will allow colleagues to spend more time deriving insights from data rather than cleaning data, while also improving the speediness of the response.

The FSA can draw on a range of resources, published on the GOV.UK website, to inform AI usage. For example, the Generative AI Framework, the Ethics, Transparency and Accountability Framework, the Data Ethics Framework, the AI Opportunities Action Plan, and the Algorithmic Transparency Recording Standard.

The FSA also has access to the Government Digital Service, part of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, for expert advice.