Incident Management Plan: Chief Executive Officer foreword

Document control

Ownership and maintenance of this plan and internal supporting documentation is the responsibility of the Resilience Team, part of the Incidents and Resilience Unit of the Food Standards Agency. This Plan is reviewed on an annual basis. This document was reviewed and updated in June 2023 and is Version 8. Version 8 was published in April 2021. Some sections of Version 8 were revised in June 2023 leading to this current version, Version 8 (a).

Version 7 of the Non-Routine Incident Management Plan was reviewed in September 2019 for publication in April 2020.  However, due to the Covid-19 Pandemic this was delayed. This document has undergone a further review to integrate lessons learned and best practice developed as part of that response.

Chief Executive Officer foreword

At the Food Standards Agency we are committed to ensuring there is food you can trust.  Reacting swiftly and effectively to food and feed incidents is a key part of delivering on that goal.

In 2021/22 the FSA investigated 2,336 food, feed, food contact material and environmental contamination incidents in England, Northern Ireland, and Wales. This represents an increase  in the number of notified incidents from 1,978 in 2020/21 and is similar to pre-pandemic years.  

The majority of incidents are dealt with using routine incident management procedures, but when the nature and/or scale of an incident exceeds this scope and meets the criteria for escalation to non-routine, this plan will be invoked.

This plan provides the necessary structures and governance arrangements to enable the FSA to scale up its incident response to manage all types of incident. It also sets out how we now communicate food or feed safety issues with Europe and internationally since the UK exited the EU. 

We continue to improve our incident response arrangements through testing and conducting lessons learnt activities. The FSA also routinely participates in cross-government emergency exercises. This plan will continue to evolve to reflect our learning and changes to central government emergency preparedness arrangements. I’m very proud of the way that the FSA handles incidents and learns and embeds lessons from them.

We welcome feedback on the plan as this will contribute to regular reviews and ensure this document continues to be fit for purpose. Should you wish to comment please email the Resilience Team at resilience.planning@food.gov.uk. 

Emily Miles, Chief Executive Officer
Food Standards Agency