The report’s two main highlights were: first, a call for a new food crime unit to be created within the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to combat food fraud; and, secondly, the return of food authenticity and compositional labelling responsibility to the FSA, which was removed by the coalition government in 2010 and transferred to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).
Despite being welcomed by environment secretary Owen Paterson, it is by no means certain that the government which commissioned Elliott to carry out the review will accept his recommendations in full.
While Paterson is unlikely to find anything too contentious in the establishment of a food crime unit to combat food fraud, admitting that the government got it wrong by disempowering the FSA and moving food authenticity and compositional labelling responsibility to DEFRA, is quite another matter.
This is where it all gets a bit political: it has to be remembered that the FSA, set up in 2000, was the baby of the last Labour administration. Its role was to restore consumer confidence in the wake of the BSE crisis which, as we all recall, came to a head under the last Tory government's watch.
Elliott’s final report is due to be published sometime this spring. It will be interesting to see what the government's response is. Will it accept the findings in full? Cherry pick those which it finds most palatable? Or quietly let it gather dust on the shelves in the hope that by the time of the 2015 general election, everyone's minds are on other things.