Enough is enough! This legislation can't go on

It would not be surprising if issues such as food labelling, nutrition and food legislation were to assume lesser priority than affordability of food as far as the consumer is concerned.

I am reminded of an event back in the late 1980s when a delegation representing Russian consumer bodies met their UK counterparts. At the time, food safety was top of the UK's agenda. The Russians listened politely to what the UK representatives had to say on this and other matters of the day. Then the Russian contingent asked for advice on their top-priority issue: the food queues. Obviously, we will never see food queues in the UK, but it makes you think there may be such a thing as too much regulation for consumer interests.

Enough is enough! We are seeing enormous cuts in our Civil Service including the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the Food Standards Agency but none that I'm aware of in the European Commission (EC). That means that the EC's capacity to produce new proposals remains intact while our ministries and those of other Member States may struggle to represent their interests in Brussels if the generation of new proposals continues at this rate.

One might have hoped that the new Food Information Regulation (FIR) would put a cap on the need for more work on food labelling legislation for some years ahead. But no! There are so many parts of FIR that need interpretation that formal guidance will need to be produced with all the consultations that will entail. This was surely not part of the original intention.

I looked up the impact assessment produced as an EC staff working document in January 2008, which led to the FIR, and found one of the aims was to 'achieve legal clarity and a harmonised implementation'.

The paper also said: 'one concise regulation will provide for better clarity, rationality and consistency of enforcement'. I looked up 'rationality' in Wikipedia and found that the word is used differently in different disciplines. Apparently, the German sociologist, Max Weber, identified four types of rationality, one of which involves a motive independent of whether it will lead to success. This might not have been the meaning in the mind of the official who chose that word, but the result indicates otherwise.

So we are facing a mammoth round of further drafting to try to interpret what the draftsmen might have intended had they been thinking rationally.

Clare Cheney​
Director general​
Provision Trade Federation​
pyner.purarl@cebigenqr.pb.hx​​