Closure of food testing laboratories 'would put public safety at risk'

Public safety will be put at risk with the planned closure of two of the country’s five Food, Water and Environment laboratories, which protect communities from significant health threats, according to insiders at Public Health England (PHE).

The agency’s Birmingham and Preston sites could be shut in the coming weeks with up to 40 job losses, in a bid to save £1m in response to budget cuts.

Their responsibilities will be transferred to York. The other labs are in London and at Porton Down near Salisbury, Wiltshire.

The sites in England provide a range of services which PHE says protect the public from “significant health threats associated with food, water and environmental hazards”.

Technicians test food from restaurants, dairy products, water and other samples, searching for diseases such as salmonella, legionella and virulent strains of E.coli. Results can be used as evidence for prosecutions in food poisoning and contamination cases.

Staff were called to a meeting in London earlier this month and told of the closure plans. One insider told The Independent: “York handling everything north of the Midlands will inevitably result in a lot of delays in getting results as the workload goes up. It all seems a bit unrealistic.

“Food manufacturers and outlets are no longer being policed properly by environmental health officers because they have been cut back [by councils], so this will make things worse.”

The source questioned whether the seven-figure sum would actually be saved, given the extra costs for ferrying around samples and the added workload for the York lab.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if they start using private labs to make up the shortfall in resources,” they said.

The use of private labs for food testing proved controversial several years ago when Cadbury was fined £1m for food and hygiene offences after salmonella was found in several of its products. The incident occurred in 2006 during routine company testing, but the Food Standards Agency was not informed for five months. The Health Protection Agency, the forerunner to PHE, discovered a puzzling rise in salmonella cases and traced it back to Cadbury via the private lab that had tested the samples, and only after the private lab initially refused to reveal the source.

“If we go down the road of using private labs for public testing then we could find ourselves in similar situations,” the PHE source said.

Dorothy Fogg, the Unite regional officer responsible for Public Health England, told The Independent its planned lab closures would put public safety at risk.

She said: “This is another worrying development: more cuts to services. The potential loss of 40 skilled jobs is also to be strongly deplored. Any delay because of these two closures in analysing results could pose a problem to the public health.

“Three years ago there were about 19 labs all around the country. These have been reduced to five and with the proposed closure of another two it will mean lots of travel, if not for the people collecting the samples then for the samples themselves. This is a major blow for food, water and environmental hygiene.”

A PHE spokesperson said: “We are consulting our staff and partners on proposals to increase the resilience of the current service model and reduce the costs for the taxpayer by operating from three specialist laboratories rather than the current five laboratories. Final decisions will be made following the consultation which closes in December.”