With full cost recovery neatly tucked under their belt, it certainly hasn’t taken the Food Standards Agency (FSA) long to find something new to amuse themselves with.
Apparently their latest wheeze is something called the “ FSA Operational Assurance Team.” The whaaat I hear you mutter? Yes, unbelievably, not content with vets, lead vets, auditing vets, meat inspectors, senior meat inspectors, meat technicians (who have I forgotten?!), along comes yet another unstatutory group of jobsworth people to take a “snapshot of performance” as they call it with visits “unannounced to both operators and the OV and his team.”
I’ve never been afraid of unannounced visits at any time; indeed, have championed their cause. But in addition to the rest of a veritable army of inspectors? Mindnumbing really, just the sort of game that bureaucrats with nothing better to do play. Guess the abattoir sector will put up with it, though, they have everything else.
Yes, they’ll co-operate, and what will they get for that co-operation? The same, absolutely nothing. After all that has happened over the years and the contemptible way the trade has been ritually sidelined by officialdom, it does beg an obvious question. Where is sound progress ever going to come from for the slaughtering industry? In the twenty years or so that I have been campaigning for logical and workable ways forward, one point has remained constant throughout – things simply keep just getting worse!
And that, I’m afraid, is the way it will stay unless the trade and its spokespeople have the nerve and gumption to alter the agenda on the way communications with the authorities are handled. Trotting along to this forum, or that meeting has been proved to be counterproductive; worse than that, it actually plays into the officials hands who can, and do ,claim to be “listening” to views when of course they are doing no such thing.
The Scottish wholesalers are standing up for the cause, though, and have never shirked from going public with the truth; they have put a marker down, it just needs the will to follow it.
The FSA also seems to be raising the ante on abattoir licensing. In their May issue of “Tec Files”, in what looks like a recce to raise their profile on this subject, a Dennis Cryer has devoted two whole pages of this self-congratulatory magazine in presenting where the FSA should be going in carrying out its regulatory duties.
One has become used to the sort of language these people use to intimidate and frighten and this is such a case. So inflammatory and downright inaccurate in fact that the next blog will concentrate and comment solely on this article.
Our backs are where they have always been. To the wall.
To succeed you have to try. Toby Baker.