Food board must be fully independent

THE most important thing we should all bear in mind about the new Food Safety Board announced yesterday by the Minister for Health is this: it is an interim board, set up pending the passing of legislation to establish a statutory body. This means hat, in theory at least, nothing whatever about the board announced yesterday is cast in stone. The debate about what kind of Good Safety Board we need has been opened, not closed, by yesterday's announcement.

Indeed, I would respectfully suggest to the members of the interim board that they start work by scrutinising their own terms of reference. Far from accepting those terms as a given, they should regard them as merely provisional.

The interim board should certainly have a major input into the creation of the structure of the eventual statutory body. But I could go further: it should take it on itself to promote a national debate on the matter. It should also carry out a wide ranging public consultation about present perceptions on food safety, and about what the public sees as the needs which the statutory board must fulfil.

By taking such actions, it would, immediately demonstrate twos things that in my view are essential:

- First, that it is determined to be independent of the Government, that set it up;

- Second, that the only master it: sees itself as serving is the customer.

Independence will be the foundation stone of the board's credibility. It is the very reason for its existence: to be able to hold up to the world the judgment of a genuinely independent body, untainted by any association with vested interests.

I am not yet sure that people fully appreciate just how hard it will be to create that reputation of independence. The task is all the more difficult when we remember that the audience we have to convince is primarily outside Ireland, not within it.

THE Food Safety Board of Ireland has to earn a reputation such that its imprimatur will fully satisfy a potential buyer of our food in Germany, Russia or the Middle East wherever in the world we seek to, sell our food products.

The opening assumption of a [typical overseas buyer will be that any Irish board is unlikely to be fully open and impartial about Irish food. A further assumption would be that the board is an agency of government, and therefore operates under the umbrella of government policy.

It would certainly not be an opening assumption of overseas buyers that this board will act exclusively in their interests - or indeed, in their interests at all.

The challenge is this: unless the board can overturn those assumptions, and put exactly contrary ones in their place, then it will be a complete waste of time and money.

So a first useful question is: how can such a board create the necessary credibility overseas?

My initial suggestion on this is that the membership of the board should include, as a statutory requirement, a number of people who are not Irish, who do not live in Ireland, and who have no vested interests in Ireland or any previous connection with it. Ideally, they should be people of international standing in a relevant field, or whose independence is transparently unimpeachable.

Appointing such people would be a first for the Irish public service, but that should not stop us doing it. Neither should the expense of bringing such people on board, because their potential contribution is priceless.

With this in mind, the interim board should demand the power to recommend appointments to its own membership: it is likely to be far better at international head hunting than the Department of Health.

The independence of a board is not determined only by who you put on it. It is also affected by the security of their tenure. If individual members of a board, or the whole board collectively, can be removed at the whim of a government minister, then the perceived independence of that board is lessened.

In the case of many semi state bodies, it is fully appropriate that the government can dismiss the board. It is the ultimate control over agencies that are, after all, deliberately designed to be only semi autonomous. But that is not the case here. We do not want the Government to have any control over the Food Safety Board. We do not want the board to be semi autonomous; we need it to be totally autonomous.

From this it follows that membership of the board should be entrenched. It should be as hard for the Government to remove a member as it is to remove a judge.

The model of the judiciary is a useful one for us to keep in mind: "the Food Safety Board should be perceived as a quasi judicial institution, not as an arm of government.

SIMILAR considerations apply to reporting. Semi state bodies report to their sponsoring minister, and that minister and his department direct the overall policy of the organisation. We don't want that here, either. It is the public to whom the Food Safety Board should report - and report directly, not through the medium of government or even parliament.

This brings me to the second essential element in building credibility for the board - that it is seen to be serving the customer and no one else.

It is vital that we work on the premise that the Food Safety Board has no responsibility whatever to the Irish food industry, or even to the Irish economy. Its responsibility is solely to the customer for Irish food, at home and abroad.

Of course, if it serves the customer properly, then it will do a world of necessary good for the Irish food industry and for the Irish economy of which that industry is such an important part. But it can only serve the customer properly by ignoring totally any wider considerations. It is not the job of the Food Safety Board to balance conflicting interests, and find a compromise between them.

The Food Safety Board should have one master, and one master alone: the customer. Our task over the coming months is to create a statutory structure that will reflect fully that overriding fact.