Health, Social Care and Sport Committee 10 June 2025
That is a very timely question, because we will discuss that issue at next week’s board meeting. The public consultation for our new strategy will take place from August to September. As I said earlier, the chief executive and I did an assessment of the “WHO Global Strategy for Food Safety 2022-2030”, and we have identified the areas in which we feel that we must improve, some of which I have a note of. We have been looking very closely at consumer protection again. We want to up our science and evidence base; to evolve and reform the regulatory landscape; to provide an effective public service for the people of Scotland; and to ensure that we deliver effective, efficient, inclusive and consulted-on services.
In addition, in our next strategy, we will include more on sustainability and climate change so that we have more of a strategic commitment to the requirements to improve the sustainable environment. If anybody is interested, I would be happy to share that analysis of how we compare in relation to the work that is being undertaken worldwide.
As I said, the public consultation will run from 1 August until 12 September. Stakeholders will be emailed with a link that will enable them to complete the consultation, and a reminder will be sent halfway through the consultation period. We will share the consultation directly with local authorities through our monthly enforcement report, to allow them to comment, and we will put a live link to the consultation on social media.
In our regular meetings with stakeholders—we have many such meetings with the Food and Drink Federation Scotland, Scotland Food & Drink and other bodies such as Quality Meat Scotland—we will advise them that the consultation is live and will invite them to comment. We will also share the consultation with MSPs and Scottish MPs at Westminster. Throughout the period for which the consultation is live, we will monitor the completion rate and the type of organisations that complete it, and we will target areas that we feel are underrepresented in the process so that we can have confidence in the robustness of our consultation.