Work of the regional teams

In addition to routinely communicating Agency salt reduction messages to local authority, public health and food partners through targeted e-bulletins and publications, the teams have worked with a number of regional partners on specific local projects to increase awareness of the effect of salt on health and to reduce salt consumption:

• Nottingham – worked with Nottingham PCT and Nottingham City Council on a social marketing-based salt campaign to target black and minority ethnic (BME) communities.
• Greater Merseyside – worked with local PCTs, Heart of Mersey (a charity-led coronary heart disease (CHD) prevention programme) and Liverpool City Council to raise salt awareness to tackle the very high levels of CHD in Merseyside. This involved running stalls at local shopping centres, giving salt reduction messages to shoppers and offering small pots of herbs to promote their use as a salt substitute.
• Manchester – helped Manchester PCT develop a salt poster as part of their ‘Get Manchester Moving’ campaign.
• Portsmouth – supported Portsmouth City Council on a salt reduction initiative in an area of the city with high rates of CHD. This work focused on local schools and working with BME community leaders.
• Trading Standards Institute (TSI) Salt Toolkit – helping to develop a toolkit to encourage a greater contribution by local authority trading standards officers to salt reduction work. The toolkit can be found on the TSI website at the link below.

Traffic light colours on the labels of foods to indicate the levels of fats, salt, and sugars are key to helping consumers make informed choices about the food they buy. The regional teams are promoting this labelling system with local authorities, public health bodies and industry.

This has involved giving presentations at regional events and to local businesses. For example, in the East Midlands, the Agency is working with a regional industry forum which is offering free nutritional analyses to help local food producers determine the traffic light colours on their products with a view to adopting the scheme. Materials are also being developed for use by local authority trading standards and environmental health officers so they can promote the scheme during their routine contact with local food businesses.

A key focus of regional work remains with local authorities to help improve communication, relationships and delivery. Each regional team’s regional location allows them to work more closely with local authority environmental health and trading standards officers and through them get the key food safety and healthy eating messages down to local food businesses and communities.

Regional teams frequently attend Food Liaison Groups meetings (where local authority food law enforcement officers from different authorities get together) to update on Agency issues and discuss issues of interest or concern. The Regional Unit aim to attend at least one meeting of each group during 2007/08 as well as continuing to present at enforcement officer training events.

The Agency awards a number of specific grants to local authorities to target priority work streams. Regional teams are on hand to help promote the grants and to help with best practice. These grants include:

• Safer Food, Better Business (SFBB) grants – used to implement SFBB in small caterers and retailer and improve business compliance.
• Mission: Possible! grants – a scheme to teach 7–11 year old pupils (key stage 2) food hygiene in an interactive way.
• Food hygiene and nutrition grants – used to support specific local authority food hygiene and healthy eating initiatives.

In 2007, regional teams ran a number of local workshops on SFBB good practice and Mission: Possible! and helped disseminate resources developed for local initiatives to other local authorities for further application.

Access to safe and healthy food is important in reducing health inequalities and improving the wellbeing of local communities. Local Area Agreements (LAAs) provide an important framework for local authorities and their partners to work together on food initiatives.

Following a successful initiative in the East Midlands, the Regional Unit has worked with the local authorities national coordinating body Local Authorities Coordinators of Regulatory Services (LACORS) to produce a guidance document, ‘LAAs: Guidance on Food and Health’.

More information about LAAs and Agency work can be found at the link below.

The regional teams work closely with the other Government departments based at the Regional Government Offices or working regionally. This is particularly the case with Department of Health Regional Public Health teams, which have a significant presence in all Government Offices. This has allowed joint Agency working on shared priorities relating to health inequalities, obesity and coronary heart disease.

Activities with other Government departments include:

• Food, health and schools – working with regional healthy school coordinators to support healthy eating messages in schools as part of the Healthy Schools agenda.
• Food incidents – working with East Midlands Regional Resilience Forum as a pilot to assess how the Agency’s handling and communication arrangements on major incidents could be improved.
• Traffic light labelling – working with Regional Public Health teams on events to increase understanding of food labelling, to encourage healthier eating choices in line with regional obesity reduction activity.
• Regulatory services – working with South West Regulators Forum (includes representatives from the Office of Fair Trading, Health and Safety Executive, Local Better Regulation Office and LACORS) to raise the profile of the important contribution that local authority environmental health and trading standards regulatory services make to community health and wellbeing.
• Childhood obesity – exhibition stands at regional public health events on childhood obesity, focusing on salt reduction and traffic light labelling.

Regional teams are working with the Agency’s incidents branch and regional industry food groups in the East Midlands and North West on local initiatives to improve incident handling as part of the Agency’s incident reduction programme.

Regional team work with schools is carried out with help from FSA Headquarters staff and local healthy-schools co-ordinators. The aim is to help embed Agency messages on food safety and healthy eating, and promote Agency material available to schools. Activities have included:

• British Nutrition Foundation – North West team involved in presentations to food specialist teachers at the British Nutrition Foundation’s National Nutrition Education Conference in June 2007.
• Food Safety Week (FSW) – South East team were asked to visit some selected schools to help with hand-washing demonstrations. All teams worked on some local initiatives as part of the FSW activities.
• University of the West of England – South West team worked with the university to promote traffic light labelling, salt and other Agency campaigns and developed recipes for their monthly Farmers’ Market, which coincided with Freshers' Week.
• Toolkit of resources – South West team are developing a toolkit for people working with children, to help ensure traffic light labelling messages are understood and remembered.

More information about regional activity and regional profiles can be found in a May 2007 update paper for the FSA Board at the link below.

Other information about regional teams working with local authorities on food can be found in an FSA News supplement, produced for the Local Government Association (LGA) conference held in July 2007. FSA News is the Agency’s monthly newsletter about food safety, nutrition and wellbeing.

To find out more about the Regional Unit and for general enquiries, contact the Central Unit. For a local issue or event, contact the appropriate regional team direct. Contact details can be found at the link below.