A regulator that serves the food industry rather than the consumer | Guardian

Regulatory capture – the process by which government bodies come under the thumb of the industries they are set up to regulate and the political priorities those industries lobby for – was reckoned by a leading US academic typically to take 15-20 years.

The Food Standards Agency seems sadly on target. The latest blow to this regulator’s ability to serve our interests as consumers rather than industry’s is a wrangle over who should lead it: the UK health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, favoured a senior Tory. The Scottish, Welsh and Northern Ireland administrations held out for the alternative candidate, the independent head of another government body with a strong background in science. The stand-off has left the agency ruddlerless in the middle of a destructive reorganisation imposed by the coalition, just when it is struggling to deal with the aftermath of the industrial scale adulteration of our food supply with horsemeat.

 Just 14 years ago it looked so different. The agency was set up in 2000 after serious scandals that had exposed a rotten core to our food system. After BSE, salmonella and cancer-causing dioxins in animal feed, it was clear that the food and farming industry could not be trusted; nor could the old ministry of agriculture, the government department that was supposed to oversee it.

The new regulator came in to being, and it started so well. The agency was to be a non-ministerial government department – free of the political interference from ministers that had done so much to protect big farming but not enough to look after ordinary people. Its board was to be independent, with directors who had industry interests kept in the minority. It held meetings in public and set new standards for transparency in a public body. It was chaired by an eminent scientist who stood above politics, and its first chief executive was a member of that endangered species, the lifelong public servant who was past-master at politics with a small p of the sort needed to build working relationships across Whitehall but free of the party politics that has since crept in.

It scored some significant hits. It named and shamed industry in to reducing salt in processed foods, while giving it sufficient incentive to keep it onside.

But gradually its independence was eroded. Professors Erik Millstone and Tim Lang have charted the increasing shift to board members with industry interests. In 2000, there were 14 on the board, of whom five declared personal interests, but by the end of 2007 there were 12 of whom 11 either worked or had worked for a food, farming or catering company, had a close relative who did so, or were advisers to or had financial interests in the sector. The balance has tipped back since, but then the board is shrunken to eight. The stop-gap chair is a former president of the National Farmers Union.

Labour, as in so many areas, is weakened in opposition because it was part of the trend. It was under a Labour government that a former Labour minister was appointed as the agency’s most recent permanent chair, so it can hardly complain when the Conservatives want their own man, too.

 None of this is to impugn the integrity of the individuals promoted for the jobs. But as we witness the hollowing out of the Whitehall machine, the shift to developing policy outside formal channels, the huge cuts in career experts both in government departments and in the regulatory bodies, it might be a good idea to remember the lesson of history. The last time we had a food and farming industry that had captured government, it did not end so well.

Felicity Lawrence

reblog/source@:http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/05/food-standards-agency-leadership-regulator-industry