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Food Standards Agency to be abolished
Britain’s new coalition government is set to abolish the Food Standards Agency, which was originally set up after the mad cow disease crisis.
The move will fulfil a pre-election pledge by health secretary Andrew Lansley to strip the Food Standards Agency of its responsibilities for nutrition and diet advice.
However, reports suggest that Lansley is bowing to the food industry, which has opposed the agency’s ‘traffic light’ approach to food labelling.
Lansley has been critical of the agency’s promotion of traffic light food labelling to tackle rising levels of obesity, saying its approach was “counter-productive”.
The Food Standards Agency was founded by the Labour government in 2000 in the aftermath of the BSE crisis that damaged the public’s confidence in food safety.
The agency employs 2,000 staff and spends £135m a year.
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