Food Standards Agency will be “open and independent”

The three aims of the United Kingdom's Food Standards Agency will be to put the consumer first, to operate in a transparent way, and to be an independent voice, the agency's chairman, John Krebs, professor of zoology at Oxford University, told MPs last week.

The agency was set up as a government department in the wake of several public health scares linked to food, such as outbreaks of salmonella and Escherichia coli and the admitted link between bovine spongiform encephalopathy and Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease.

Professor Krebs told the MPs from the agriculture and health committees that, although the board's members had been appointed, the board had not yet …