Health, Social Care and Sport Committee 10 June 2025
I will take your last question first. We absolutely agree that food biosecurity matters. Food Standards Scotland is what we call the central competent authority for food in Scotland. We are the largest employer of official veterinarians and we deploy those staff into approved slaughterhouses. Since European Union exit, we have repeatedly flagged concerns about the number of available qualified veterinary personnel who would ultimately carry out a lot of those checks, as well as food enforcement personnel in local government.
In the past few years, we have changed to having a fully employed veterinary delivery model, which gives us better control over the recruitment, competency and training of those personnel. However, it is a fact that Food Standards Scotland has only two UK official veterinarians in our employ; the vast majority come from the EU. Thanks to our fully employed model, which is more attractive than the contracted model that is used elsewhere in the UK, we continue to attract staff.
In one sense, we have mitigated some of the elements of the required biosecurity controls. However, we must consider that a lot of the food law delivery sits within local government. We are just about to embark on our Scottish authority food enforcement re-build—SAFER—programme, which is about the rebuilding and reform of the food law delivery landscape in Scotland. We have repeatedly flagged multiple concerns about the fragility of the system and the fact that some elements of the system are not functioning particularly well at the moment. There are risks, but we are mitigating them, working with partners across the UK, and we are looking to embark on a journey of reform over the next three to four years.