Welcome to the ninth Regulating our Future Newsletter.

Welcome to the ninth Regulating Our Future Newsletter. This month we are focusing on the progress we have made on our National Inspection Strategies and the next steps for Enhanced Registration. These are both significant parts of our overall design for a modernised regulatory framework, and I am delighted we have made such significant advances towards both going live. It's a reminder that, every now and then, we should stand back and remind ourselves why we've embarked on an ambitious, long term, reform programme and the benefits it will deliver to consumers, to public confidence, to businesses and to local authorities. You can see that captured succinctly in this table.

At the same time, we still have to battle against misunderstandings and misrepresentation of what we are about. I was very disappointed in a recent report by Professors Lang and Millstone, replaying the myth that we want to remove local authorities from their place at the heart of food regulation and suggesting that in future businesses would be able to choose a sub-contractor "to mark their homework for them." As I said at the FSA's Board meeting last month, neither of these claims is true. We have no plans to remove local authorities from the front line of ensuring food is safe and what it says it is. What we are doing is enhancing the role of LAs by making available to them other sources of information that will inform the type and frequency of intervention required. Under ROF LAs will continue to have ultimate responsibility for enforcement of food safety and food standards regulation.

We will be publishing a comprehensive report later in the year which will outline where we have got to and the key projects that we are working on for the rest of this year and into 2019. As always, we want to hear your views and do please get in touch via FutureDelivery@food.gov.uk

Heather Hancock

FSA Chairman

Next steps for Enhanced Registration

Enhanced Registration is a key part of the ROF programme. It aims to improve the registration process to get better quality data about food businesses which will help LAs prioritise and tailor their activities and give us a unified view of all food businesses in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

Proposals for Primary Authority food safety national inspection strategies

Over the last year we have been exploring how Primary Authority could play a role in the Regulating Our Future Model.

Our focus has been considering the concept of national inspection strategies for food safety partnerships.

A national inspection strategy effectively allows a primary authority to take more control of proactive interventions across a business (or group of businesses), reducing proactive interventions if there is strong evidence that the business is compliant and managing its risks well.

The Regulating Our Future consumer community panel

The new Regulating Our Future (ROF) consumer community panel made up of 12 people from England, Wales and Northern Ireland, met for the first time in March 2018. The panel which has a mix of new and former panel members will provide a consumer perspective on the priority actions for ROF during the delivery and implementation phase of the programme.