The Food Standards Agency was set up in 2000 by an act of Parliament following a number of food crises in the U.K., notably BSE and foot-and-mouth disease. The consequence of those food crises was largely that the public lost any confidence in the way in which their food was being regulated. On the whole, they believed it was regulated for the interests of business rather than the interests of the public.
So we were set up very much as a fresh start following those problems, with a very clear piece of legislation that has one objective, which is to protect public health and the other interests of consumers in relation to food. Our remit covers food safety, nutrition, and the choice of food.
When the agency was set up, it was very determined to operate completely differently from the way in which any other regulator had operated, in order to be very clear to the public that we were genuinely putting them first. From the beginning, the agency has operated in a completely open and transparent way. So, for example, all our board meetings are held in public, both with members of the public attending and the meetings being web-streamed. The commitment of the agency is that every single policy decision will be discussed in public so that people can see the way in which we're making the decision and what we're taking into account.
That openness and transparency are also very useful in underpinning our independence, which is the second key attribute of the agency. We are independent from government, and we illustrate that independence through the open and transparent way in which we work.
Also the structure of the agency underpins that independence. Instead of having a minister running the agency, we have a chair and a board, all of whom are appointed after public advertisement, interviews—that whole normal process of application.
Under the act, we have the freedom to publish the advice and the information we give ministers. The whole premise is that we are an independent agency that acts transparently.
We're staffed by civil servants. We have offices in London and in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. We have about 700 on staff. We also have an executive agency that looks after meat issues, which has 1,700 on staff.
Perhaps the most significant thing I should say about us is that what we do is absolutely based on science. It is the fundamental building block of the way in which we work. In order to help us with that, we have nine independent scientific advisory committees, with about 150 scientists who advise the agency on the science in any particular area.
Our budget translates into about $260 million Canadian. We are responsible for the assessment, communication, and management of risk, and for the development of policy for the U.K. government as a whole. We give advice to the government and the public, and through the structure of local authorities in the U.K., we also regulate and enforce. We set the framework, and the enforcement is done for us by the local authorities.
We're very big spenders on scientific research, which is commissioned through open competition. We have projects lasting anywhere from quick projects up to three years. We spend about $60 million Canadian on research every year, and we're the biggest commissioners of nutritional research in the U.K.
If you were to ask if it worked, I would say one measure of that might be the trust the public has in us. We measure this with an annual consumer attitudes to food survey. Currently about 80% of consumers are aware of the agency, and 66% say they're confident in the role of the Food Standards Agency in protecting health. That's been a steadily upward line from the time we were founded. That, I think, is a tremendously important marker for the way in which we operate. It does look as though that independence and transparency and openness are generally underpinning public trust.
I think I'm going to hand over to Gill at this point. I could tell you about food safety, but I know you're not interested in that, and what you really want to get on to is diet and health. If there's anything about the foundation of the agency that you want to ask now, please do so.
As Deirdre said, one of our roles is to help improve diet and health in the U.K. Our aim is therefore to make it easier for consumers to choose a healthier diet to help to reduce diet-related disease, including obesity.
I want to highlight that we are really working in three key areas: first, to raise awareness in people, consumers. For example, we have worked on improving labelling and on increasing awareness of a particular issue, such as too much salt being bad for your heart. We also work very closely in terms of products, by influencing others to change their products, or by encouraging reformulation to benefit consumers through, for instance, salt or saturated fat reduction. Finally, we do a lot of work to influence the environment in which people are living and working. That involves working within schools, working with the legislation area, and helping to remove barriers to healthier choices.
I really want to flag up that we put great emphasis on working in partnership to get buy-in on what we want to achieve, but also to help those dreams and actions actually become reality. The front-of-pack labelling approach is one part of that particular jigsaw. That's the area we will be talking about later, which Rosemary can cover off now.
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We started work on front-of-pack nutrition labelling following the report of a select committee of the House of Commons here that looked at obesity. It reported in May 2004, recommending that there should be simplified information on the front of the pack, having heard lots of evidence that people found the current arrangements at that time, the back-of-pack information, too complicated and unhelpful.
In July 2004 we met with stakeholders to really scope what the options were. We identified about half a dozen different types of approaches that different stakeholders thought might be appropriate. We then embarked on a program of consumer research, again alongside stakeholders, to look at the merits of those different approaches. We carried out some qualitative work looking at preferences that consumers had for these different formats. When we had completed that work, we met with stakeholders again, to share with them the results of that work, to look at what were the most favoured formats, and to discuss how we might look at the performance of those formats, because, clearly, although it's important that a format is liked by consumers, it's arguably even more important that consumers can use that format effectively.
Following quite extensive discussions with stakeholders and some further research on different formats, to make sure we had optimized the formats, we consulted with stakeholders on the methodology for that definitive piece of performance and preference research and then carried out that research during 2005. It was a large piece of work. We spoke to more than 2,500 consumers to make sure we had a quantitative study that allowed us to look at the impact on different population groups. We carried out that work, as I said, during 2005, and then subsequently, toward the end of 2005, we consulted on proposals built on the evidence that came out of the research.
Then in March 2006 the agency's board looked at all that consumer research evidence and all the responses to that public consultation and made the recommendation that we are now taking forward. The recommendation was one that was based on four core principles. What the board recommended was that businesses should voluntarily place on the front of the pack nutrition information following these four core principles, which I'll just go through.
The first was that there should be information on four key nutrients: fat, saturated fat, sugars, and salt. The second was that the front-of-pack information should include the amount of each of those nutrients per portion of the product. The third principle was that for each of those nutrients, a red, amber, or green colour code would be used to indicate whether that level was high, medium, or low. The fourth principle was that criteria agreed to by the Food Standards Agency should be used to determine which colour was used.
The agency recommended that information should be provided on the front of the pack for seven categories of food. Again, this followed consumer research showing that there were specific food categories where consumers felt this information would be most helpful, which are, essentially, rather complex processed foods such as ready meals, sandwiches, pizzas, and so on.
Following that recommendation, which was in March 2006, we are very pleased that more that 30% of the retail market in the U.K. has now adopted front-of-pack labelling following those four core principles, and we also have an increasing number of food manufacturers now adopting that approach.
At this point it probably makes sense for us to stop and take any questions you might have.
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That's really a very good question.
The first thing to say is that this system is only just being rolled out. One supermarket in particular has quite a lot of its products marked with traffic light labels, but other supermarkets and indeed manufacturers are just rolling the process out. So at the moment it's too early to have any really robust information about the consequences.
There is anecdotal information about people changing purchasing behaviour and some change in the sales of high-fat products, for example, which have dropped, whereas healthier products seem to have gone up. But the more important thing, I think, is that you will know—I'm sure you will have heard—that Tesco and the majority of the manufacturers have introduced a different system of front-of-pack labelling, which is not the same as the one the agency wants. Rather than the two sides, as it were, fighting each other, what we have agreed to do is to set up the research that will look, in 18 months' time, on a rolling process, at what form of labelling has changed consumers' behaviour the most, and that's been put out to an independent group headed by the government's chief social scientist.
The purpose of that is precisely as you suggest, to get the real evidence as to what works or what works less well. I think that's going to be quite exciting, because actually, in one sense we've just engaged 55 million U.K. consumers in a huge piece of research around consumer behaviour.
Do you want to add, Gill?
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First of all, I want to thank you very much for being so clear in your presentation, as Ms. Brown alluded to at your very first questioning. You presented yourselves very well and you came out very clearly, and the answers we had will help us a long way in our report.
We don't have any more questions at this time, but we certainly will be looking forward to watching your progress as your country moves along on the signpost labelling, to see how effective it actually is with regard to reducing obesity in your country.
Thank you very much for being with us. We will sign off now. We're very pleased to have had you testify before us.
Ms. Deirdre Hutton: Thank you very much.
The Chair: I don't know if you have it on your agenda—I'm sure you don't. We have another individual, Richard Caborn, Minister of State, Minister for Sport, and the minister responsible for obesity from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport in the United Kingdom, who will be on a videoconference at 11:30. So we can break. This was actually just last minute, but it will be very interesting to hear from the minister in charge of this department.
We should talk about this now. Ms. Gagnon phoned me on Friday. She was a little concerned about our moving into a discussion on a report. I believe she has talked to you. She said she had. I'm very open to that. The idea was to try to bring up the opportunity for any of the new members who had just reviewed the report last week, to be able to talk about it and to put any questions they might have on it. It is open to having some questions on it, but I don't think we want to get into it too far, in fairness, because she can't be here and the NDP can't be here, either. I am open to having questions answered if you want to go that route, but if not, we can take it up at another time. What is your pleasure?
We will also have lunch brought in at noon.
I'm a minister now, but I used to be the chairman of the Select Committee on Trade and Industry many years ago, so I have had the experience of being in your position.
Can I first of all thank you very much for inviting the Commons from the U.K., because this is clearly an issue that many countries around the world are actually sharing, and that's the difficulty of obesity and being overweight.
As far as England is concerned, half of our adults now are either overweight or obese, and on top of that, about one in four of our children are either overweight or obese. It is projected that if the current trends continue, something like 20% of our child population will be obese by the year 2010. That in reality is one million young people in the United Kingdom.
The overall cost of that obesity to the National Health Service—and you may well have the statistics—is estimated to be about £1 billion per year, and the cost to the economy is estimated to be between £2.3 billion and £2.6 billion a year. That is expected to rise given the trends that are with us at the moment; if they continue, that will have gone to £3.6 billion by the year 2010.
So we can see that both our countries, Canada and England, are facing real problems with obesity, and that's not just true in the developed world but also in the developing world. All the information with us to date is showing that nobody has actually managed to hold the rise; we all seem to be facing the same challenges
Whilst there is no single factor to which the rise in childhood obesity can be attributed, it is really about calories in, calories out. Indeed, that's what we're now trying to address in the United Kingdom. The factors also go far afield as architecture and town planning, given that the last towns planned in England—the “new towns”, as we call them—were designed around the motor car. We're now challenging some of our architects very much whether they will continue to design stairways out of buildings and escalators and lifts into them. Indeed, we now ought to move back to where we were before.
So we know very generally that we need to have this cultural shift, which we think is very important to get across the whole of the community. That's why departments right across government—the Department of Health and the Department for Education and Skills—are also involved in trying jointly to tackle the question of obesity, and that I only have part of the responsibility for obesity, as you rightly say.
We, as a government, have committed ourselves to halt the year-on-year increase in obesity among our children under 11 years of age, and we hope we can achieve that by the year 2010. That is a joint target, as I said, for the three departments: my own department, the DCMS, or Department of Culture, Media and Sport; along with the Department of Health and the Department for Education and Skills.
I think we are making some headway in this direction. You have been talking to the independent broadcast regulator in the U.K., Ofcom, and they've now published their new restrictions on the advertising and promotion of children's food and drink high in fat, salt, and sugar. This means there is a total ban now on adverts for foods with high fat, salt, and sugar on all children's programs, and indeed on all dedicated children's channels. We are now monitoring that closely to see what the impact of the Ofcom measures are across all the media and whether or not there's going to be a real change in the nature and balance of food promotion. When we've got that information, we'll decide what future action is necessary—and possibly that could lead into legislation as well.
Advertising is but one part of the approach to this. We are now consciously building back, as I said, the question of physical activity into our children's lives. There are two areas on which we've honed. First of all, there is unstructured play and physical activity in children's early years, and there we support the development of physical literacy skills for later in life. We also believe that part of that cultural shift, which is important, is about the health and participation benefits that come out of that unstructured play and physical activity.
In August of last year we published Time for Play: Encouraging greater play opportunities for children and young people. It set out what the government is doing in this area, as supported by an investment of about £155 million.
Those moneys came out of the big lottery fund here in the U.K. and are now been invested in the development of free and open access play provisions, targeting the areas of greatest need and deprivation, particularly around unemployment and social problems.
We have also made excellent progress in schools, and I think this has been one of our successes. In April 2001 we started school sport partnerships. Our target there was to give every child, from the age of five to 16, two hours of quality physical activity or sport every week. In 2001 about 20% to 25% of our school population was estimated to be getting two hours of quality physical activity or sport. Last year, in 2006, we had actually reached beyond the 75% target we had set ourselves. We got to 80%.
In figures, that means we've gone from 2 million young people in our schools to 5 million young people who are now receiving two hours of quality physical activity or sport. That's 6 million hours a week more that our young people are receiving in their schools.
This has been driven by our 450 school sport partnerships. One sports college, eight secondaries, and an average of forty primaries make up a school sport partnership, with the output of that two hours.
By 2010 we're hoping to have increased the two hours to four hours, so two hours in the curriculum and two hours beyond the school gates. Indeed, we're now moving and investing in that area through the club structures, through our governing bodies of club structures, and also with the investment into facilities that will be used beyond the schools.
We're also developing role models to go around to the schools. For instance, Kelly Holmes, our double gold medallist at the Athens Olympics, has now signed up as one of our sporting champions. I must admit that it has a tremendous effect within the school system when people like Kelly Holmes go into the schools and start talking to young people about the need to get quality physical education and sports as well.
So we are trying to tackle it on a number of layers. One is obviously on the question of diet. We have a number of initiatives with regard to five pieces of fruit per day and so on. We're also making sure that advertising does not encourage young people, children particularly, to take foods that are not healthy for them. We're doing that through Ofcom.
We've moved on to the unstructured physical activity and play for young people, particularly up to the age of five. In our school structure, through our 450 school sport partnerships, we are now changing a culture to one where young people are experiencing sports and physical activity to a minimum of two hours a week. That, we believe, has had quite a significant effect in the recent past.
So that is our approach to date, but we are looking to other countries as well—Canada, Scandinavia, Europe—to see whether other good examples and projects are being undertaken and whether we can share those experiences to make sure we can collectively tackle what to us are major problems: overweight and obesity.
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It was an initiative of the Prime Minister to start with, there's no doubt about that, recognizing that physical activity in our young people, not just on the question of health, but also the questions of social inclusion, of education, and of academic attainment levels, could be addressed in part by having our young people more physically active and indeed involved with sports. That was how we started talking across departments. The Department for Education and Skills and my department have had a very clear working relationship for some six years now, in driving forward the school sports partnership.
If I can just explain it very briefly, the school sports partnership is a partnership for roughly 100,000 of the population. There are 450 of these partnerships in England. They comprise one sports college, eight secondary schools, and an average of between thirty to forty primary schools. Involved in those are 3,000 school sports coordinators. A coordinator is a teacher who has two to three days a week of organizing sports within the schools and between the schools and developing the whole physical activity agenda. They are back-filled by another teacher, and that's where the big investment comes in.
In terms of the link between the primary schools to their secondary school—the feeder schools—we have 18,000 primary-link teachers who have 24 days a year, who are again paid for and are back-filled by other teachers, so that they can organize sport and physical activity, again within the schools and between the schools. The output for that, as I said, is to give every child two hours of quality physical activity or sport every week from the ages of 5 to 16.
What we have seen from that is that academic attainment levels have gone up. We believe we have now settled the question of the health of our young people, particularly around type 2 diabetes. Thirdly, we find that where young people are engaged in sport and physical activity, they are less likely to get involved in activities of a disruptive nature, such as crime and social disorder.
So we are working on three agendas there: on health, on education, and on social inclusion.