Given the critical importance of hygiene in food preparation, it is astonishing that the European Commission should contemplate exempting small food businesses from Hazard Analysis Critical Control Points (HACCP) principles for hazard control under the EC Hygiene Regulation.
This was ostensibly intended as a part of the EU policy to alleviate the burden on small businesses, but compromise cannot be entertained in the specific area of food safety.
The Specialist Cheesemakers Association (SCA) supports this philosophy. Its members are mainly small businesses.
Many are very small. Despite their size, they employ HACCP principles appropriate for the scale of their operations.
Underpinning this, the SCA's updated edition of The Specialist Cheesemakers Code of Best Practice was launched last month and an auditing system is being developed to run alongside?.
In his foreword to the Code, the SCA's patron, HRH The Prince of Wales ?said he shared "the determination of the Specialist Cheesemakers Association that this updated Code, unequalled anywhere else in the world, will add value to the quality of the specialist cheeses in this country and will prove indispensable to cheesemakers and environmental health officers alike"
?If small farm cheesemakers can operate along these lines, it should be possible for other categories to do the same given time and expert advice.
Identifying realistic areas for lifting burdens is hard.
Businesses that have changed practices to meet new legislation may find it as expensive to reverse these as it was to introduce them. Therefore, ?European powers ?should divert resources towards more effective enforcement of existing legislation.
Small businesses need help and advice on how to comply with the rules, and enforcement authorities are logically best placed to provide this.
Considering it took so long for the Commission to accept the need for consolidation of the plethora of directives covering hygiene requirements in various sectors - despite years of industry lobbying - it seems premature to conduct a review before the new regulations have bedded down.
Clare Cheney
Director General
Provision Trade Federation