My Lords, I will make a brief contribution. In fact, I was going to opt out altogether because I did not want to repeat anything that anyone else had said. Certainly, I support the questions that the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, asked at
the beginning of the debate and, frankly, I expect the Minister to answer all six of them. They were quite specific.
It is worth pointing out that, unlike Ministers, the Food Standards Agency is actually required to do things by law. I will read out Section 1(2) of the Food Standards Act 1999:
“The main objective of the Agency in carrying out its functions is to protect public health from risks which may arise in connection with the consumption of food (including risks caused by the way in which it is produced or supplied) and otherwise to protect the interests of consumers in relation to food.”
By law, Ministers do not have that obligation. They think they can hump it away in the Commons, but I have news for them: if they want to take on the role of Food Safety Minister, they ought to have a bit of a history lesson about salmonella, orange juice, BSE and CJD. Then they will realise why the FSA was put there in the first place. It was not a happy experience for previous Ministers without its support.
I will make one further point relating to what the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, has said about chlorinated chicken. I do not think I have got her wrong, but I do not want to mislead. She said that she could eat it safely because the issue was about animal welfare, not the safety of the food, and she is right. However, published research from the University of Southampton has shown that chlorine washing of food does not take away all the nasty bits. They started off, I think, by washing vegetables, but they have since looked at meat—I am not sure whether this was chicken or other meat. However, the fact is that this is not a solution to the problem.
The other thing that is also worth point out is that, in the United States of America, over 400 people a year die from salmonella. In this country, no one has died—I think there was one case in the last eight years—compared to 400-plus in the United States. I am not saying that it is because they ate chlorinated chicken, but I am saying that it is pretty unsafe in respect of deaths from salmonella in the United States, which seeks to push its food onto us without necessarily labelling it. Therefore, there are some issues here that must be carefully looked at.
As for the Minister, I have not been in my office or at my desk for well over 12 months, but I have a little file up there with at least a dozen quotes from the noble Lord, Lord Gardiner, who is a reputable Minister, on food standards over the last three or four years. He has more of a claim than any other Minister to reassure the public and Parliament.
5.30 pm
The final point I want to make is relevant if one considers Ministers taking the final decision—as of course, under the law, they are entitled to do; the chief executive of the Food Standards Agency is quite correct. The reason that is okay is built into the legislation: Section 19 of the Food Standards Act 1999 gives the Food Standards Agency the statutory right to publish its advice to Ministers. It does not need Ministers’ permission to publish its briefs to Ministers. It will be a brave Minister who gets advice from the FSA that something is a bit below the standards, and who wants to take their own decision. They will certainly not be able to do it behind closed doors.
The noble Lord, Lord Lansley, removed some functions relating to food labelling and Defra from the FSA and took them behind the closed doors of the Department of Health because he wanted to abolish the FSA, and part of the price was that he had to take some of its powers away but leave it there. So, it is not quite the same. The agency in Scotland still has all the original powers: nutrition, labelling and composition. That is crucial, because there are differences. You can still have food that is safe to eat that may be an appalling composition. There is a difference between the two issues, which I think the noble Lord, Lord Krebs, originally raised.
The debate has been very interesting, but I want to hear the answers to the six questions from the noble Lord, Lord Krebs.