Health, Social Care and Sport Committee 10 June 2025
I believe that we have had a very good first 10 years and that, as an organisation, we have matured well. As part of the work on our next strategy, we want to benchmark ourselves against world standards and look at how we could improve our performance against the measures in the “WHO Global Strategy for Food Safety 2022-2030”. We are doing a lot of work to look at what is being done internationally to get a benchmark for how we could improve.
We want to have a system of food law enforcement that is based on digital evidence and information and is intelligence based. We want to be world leading by having an efficient system that enables and supports businesses to provide safe, nutritious and healthy food.
All of us here would love food and dietary health prevention to be far more on the front line when it comes to how we feed our nation. We want to have a very strong food environment that ensures that everyone, regardless of their income or their background, can access affordable food, so we need to look very closely at the food environment that we operate in Scotland.
Looking ahead, we want to see improvements in access to healthy, nutritious food and in digitalisation, to enable businesses to work proficiently and efficiently in providing good, high-quality food and meeting safety standards. We also want to ensure that our activity is strongly evidence based. Sadly, some of our budget restrictions have meant that we have had to reduce the amount of research that we do, and we would like to build that back up in some areas. Another wish for the board is that we will be able to rebuild our gathering of evidence and production of reports for the Government.