by Ross Clark - Wednesday, 5th September 2007 -

No confident, self-respecting businessman is against competition. Except, that is, when the competition is between regulatory authorities.

Regulation, one might have thought, was a natural monopoly: there should be one organisation setting the standards and making the rules.

That is not, however, quite how things work in the European Union, where the food inspection regime is becoming quite an overcrowded market.
 
In October, Bowland Dairy of Nelson, Lancashire, was forced into receivership, with the loss of 26 jobs.

The reason was that its curd cheese had been banned from sale throughout the EU.

Remarkably, this was not because its plant had been ruled a danger to the public by the local authority’s health and safety inspectors or by the Food Standards Agency (FSA), the quango set up to monitor food production in England and Wales.

On the contrary, the FSA had declared itself to be happy with the plant. The company, however, had not reckoned with the EU’s Food and Veterinary Office, which also has powers to inspect premises.

After visiting Bowland Dairy in June it said it had discovered “unlawful and unhygienic” practices, claiming that the company was using milk with traces of pesticide residue.

The EU also said Bowland had been using “floor waste” – food which had tumbled from its conveyor belt onto a stainless steel surface which, in spite of the term used by the inspectors, was nowhere near the floor.

The FSA came and checked again, but remained happy there was no risk to human health. It doesn’t accept that the method which the EU inspectors use to check for traces of antibiotic residues – the socalled “rapid screening test” – is reliable.

Bowland Dairy, therefore, carried on producing its curd cheese, believing itself to be fulfi lling the required standards. Until, that is, the EU’s inspectors arrived again in September and decided to close it down.

I can’t claim to have sniffed around Bowland Dairy’s cheese factory myself, but even so the situation comes across as bizarre.

Either the FSA is incompetent and its officials a complete waste of taxpayers’ money, or the EU’s Food and Veterinary Offi ce is a bunch of over-fussy ninnies, possibly with a political agenda on the side. It is diffi cult to come up with any other interpretation.

How is a business supposed to cope when there are two sets of inspectors with two sets of standards?

No doubt the FSA and the EU Food and Veterinary Offi ce have enjoyed arguing over the finer details of whether or not a “rapid screening test” indicates the presence of pesticides.

One can almost picture the big cheeses in the “boardroom” of the Food and Veterinary Office punching the air at the news that Bowland Dairy has gone into receivership, and exchanging self-congratulatory noises: “This has confi rmed our status as the leading brand in the food regulation business. That’ll see off those amateurs at the FSA!”

But for businesses who find themselves at the wrong end of the regulations it is an impossible situation.

Unfortunately, they can’t choose their regulator: they just have to try to muddle through and hope that they can somehow please the contradictory demands of both bodies.

And needless to say, we all end up paying for these bureaucrats to puff their chests and try to outdo each other to see who can be the most pettifogging and pedantic.

Food safety is not quite the only area of regulation which is now overseen by two competing authorities.

Once we had just the old Monopolies and Mergers Commission. Now we have the Competition Commission and the Offi ce of Fair Trading, both paid to do more or less exactly the same work.

Competition for the Monopolies and Mergers Commission: can you guess where that idea was first mooted? In a manifesto for the Offi cial Monster Raving Loony Party.