Can UK Food Safety Regulators be trusted?

by Professor Erik Millstone, Science Policy, University of Sussex

The safety of the UK’s food supply is as important to UK citizens as availability and affordability. But we can only be confident that our food is safe if we are able to trust that farmers, food processers and traders follow the rules set by regulators. Ultimately, we need to be able to trust that regulators prioritise the protection of public and environmental health over commercial interests and that the regulators’ rules are effectively enforced.

In July 2022 YouGov published a report titled the UK’s Trust in Food Index: a report on the nation’s trust in the food it consumes. It concluded that: “Overall, trust in UK institutions has gone down in the past year. Trust in food has seen the second greatest drop of eight per cent, with only gas and electricity supplies losing more trust.”

The UK has left the EU and is no longer reliant on the European Food Safety Authority and regulations set by the European Commission. The responsibilities of the UK’s advisory and decision-making system are far greater and more important than they were pre-Brexit. Motivated by our long-standing concern with food safety in the UK, Prof Tim Lang and I recently focussed on the issue of how far UK food safety regulators can be trusted.

We scrutinised the published declarations of conflicts of interest provided by many of the main actors in the UK food safety decision-making system. A rule in the UK requires all agricultural and food safety expert advisors, as well as the members of Food Standards Agency’s Board, to provide declarations of ‘conflicts of interests’ (CoIs). These are published on their institutions’ websites.  We not only gathered up-to-date figures, we also tracked developments over time. Our findings were published in Nature Food.

Credit: Michail Petrov / Shutterstock.com

What are conflicts of interest?

Conflicts of interest arise whenever individuals are in a position to prioritise their personal interests, including their financial interests, over their responsibilities to their employers, or to the organization with which they work. Such conflicts of interest seriously threaten standards of public and environmental health because they can transform organisations that were set up to protect the public interest to become subordinated to commercial interests, and succumb to what is called ‘regulatory capture’.

Right to Science in the context of toxic substances, a recent report to the UN General Assembly from the UN Human Rights Council, said: “In order for the science that forms the basis of policy to be trusted, conflicts should be avoided rather than simply managed through disclosure processes.” The UN HCR’s recommendation was eminently sensible. Requiring that CoIs are declared is not sufficient to ensure that those conflicting interests cease to influence the judgements of the individuals and the bodies of which they are members. CoIs can and should be avoided.

What did our findings show?

We only counted those CoIs that were explicitly included in the officially published list of declarations. We know of several other CoIs that had not been declared, some because the rules are not sufficiently tight, but also some declarations have been incomplete. We looked at nine expert committees that advise the Department for the Environment Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA) and the Food Standards Agency (FSA), as well as the FSA’s Board. All of those bodies and their members have key roles in deciding 1) which food and agricultural products and processes can lawfully be used and sold in the UK, 2) which are restricted and how, and 3) what is prohibited.

Table 1. Numbers of members of UK food safety system advisory bodies, that did, and did not, declare commercial conflicts of interest in 2022

All the committees have, and historically had, members who have declared CoIs. Two of the three committees that report to DEFRA have majorities declaring CoIs. The Expert Committee on Pesticides consists of sixteen members, ten of whom declared CoIs while six did not. Those ten declared CoIs with a total of nine industrial companies. The Advisory Committee on Releases to the Environment, which advises on GM crops, includes six declaring CoIs, and just one who did not. One of the six has declared commercial links to seven companies. The six collectively have commercial links with a total of sixteen companies.

The proportion of FSA Board members declaring conflicts of interests peaked in 2008, but subsequently declined. In 2022, three out of nine declared CoIs. Of the FSA’s five topic-focussed committees, all have had majorities of people declaring CoIs at some stages.

These findings provide sound reasons for being sceptical about the trustworthiness of the UK’s agricultural and food safety regulatory system. All of the components making up the regulatory system include people who are not solely focussed on the protection of public and environmental health. They have commercial interests in the economic well-being of the companies whose products they judge.

Erik Millstone is an Emeritus Professor of Science Policy at the University of Sussex. He has been researching the causes and consequences of innovation and technological change in the agricultural and food sectors since the mid-1970s. He has also analysed the structures and operations of the institutions responsible for setting agricultural and food policies, including safety standards.

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