Our Chief Executive's speech to the International Heads of Food Agencies Forum (23 April 2026)

Good afternoon colleagues, it's a real privilege to be with you again at this very important forum.

As you know I'm the Chief Executive for the Food Standards Agency (FSA) which is the UK government’s food safety regulator in England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

In this presentation I would like to share some of our research and experiences on a subject that’s so relevant to regulators in every country: public trust.

We’re living in the most information-rich period in human history. And yet, it’s never been harder for the people we serve to know what to believe or who to trust. This paradox, and how we respond to it, is one of the biggest challenges facing regulators today.

A world of uncertainty

As Ashley Bloomfield said this morning, if there’s a framework for describing the world we're operating in, it’s encapsulated in the acronym VUCA - it stands for Volatile, Uncertain, Complex and Ambiguous. It was originally developed in military strategic thinking, but it maps well onto the food system today.

Volatile

Volatility, in the shape of global events, climate change, and supply chain disruption have all driven up food prices in recent years. This volatility isn't just an economic problem.

When families are struggling to afford food, they sometimes make choices that carry real safety risks: buying from unregulated sources, extending the shelf life of food beyond recommended limits, or purchasing counterfeit products.

Uncertain

People often experience uncertainty because they find it hard to trust what they don't recognise. We’re seeing the rapid growth of new food technology and novel foods: cell-cultivated proteins, precision fermentation products, new food additives.

These are areas where the science is evolving very quickly, where public understanding is limited, and where the communications challenge is significant.

Complex

The global food supply network is vast and interconnected. Most consumers don’t know where their food comes from, how many businesses it’s passed through, or how many regulatory jurisdictions it has crossed, as regulators we don’t know that either.

The expansion of new businesses models selling food online adds another a layer of complexity to the picture.

Ambiguous

Ambiguity is part of the communications landscape we operate in. Misinformation, disinformation, viral food scares and conspiracy theories threaten to erode trust in the food system. When accurate and inaccurate information travel at the same speed, it becomes even more difficult for consumers to make the right decisions.

Against this backdrop, it is becoming increasingly challenging for regulators to manage and communicate risk.

Our role as regulators

So, what is our role in all of this?

At the FSA, our core mission is ‘food you can trust’, it encapsulates both a regulatory commitment and a communications aspiration. It's not just about the food itself. It's about the confidence that consumers can place in the system that produces, checks, and protects that food.

Our job is to reduce risk for consumers. That means protecting them from unsafe food, but also operating in a way that is transparent, accountable, and credible.

Our ability to keep people safe depends, in part, on whether they believe what we tell them. And that makes trust a core operational requirement. We hold all our Board meetings in public.

Why trust matters

At the moment we’re enjoying high levels of trust in UK food. We regard that as something very precious. We know that when trust breaks down, the consequences are significant, because the FSA was created in the wake of some deeply damaging food scandals in the 1980s and 90s, these shattered public trust in the UK food industry and the institutions that were meant to be protecting the public.

Incidents like the BSE crisis cost the UK food industry dearly, not just financially, but also in terms of the trust of consumers and international trading partners.

BSE not only cost lives but also cost the UK beef industry £900m – around £2.2bn in today’s prices. The UK only resumed beef exports to the US in 2020 - more than two decades later.

More recently, the horse meat scandal that erupted in Europe in 2013, when undeclared horse meat was found in meat products throughout the food chain, wiped nearly £300m off the value of UK supermarket chain Tesco over three months, and once again shook consumer confidence.

With trust gone, misinformation can flourish and consumers are more likely to ignore official guidance. Certain groups like the vulnerable, the food insecure, those with dietary health needs are put disproportionately at risk.

For regulators, trust isn't optional. It's the foundation on which everything else rests.

How we measure trust

At the FSA, trust is something we track carefully.

We do this mainly through our Food and You 2 survey, which gives us a consistent, comparable picture of consumer trust over time.

We use our Consumer Insights Tracker for more frequent data points. We also commission broader strategic research to understand the drivers of trust and what affects them.

What does the data tell us? Overall confidence in the safety of food remains high, with 89% of consumers in the most recent wave confident in the safety of food they purchased.

But it also tells us that trust in the food supply chain, and trust in institutions including the FSA itself, is more fragile than that headline figure might suggest.

There was a notable decline in trust between 2022 and 2023, which coincided with a period of significant political turbulence in the UK, and declining trust in government more widely.

That tells us something important: our reputation is partly in our own hands, but sometimes dependent on factors that are beyond our control. Trust in the FSA is influenced not just by what we do, but by the context in which we operate.

The data also shows us that trust is uneven. We’ve seen larger declines in trust in people with food hypersensitivities, those with lower food security, and younger consumers. That matters because these are often the people who most need reliable, authoritative information to make safe decisions.

What drives trust in the FSA

Understanding what drives trust is just as important as measuring it, and here research we commissioned from Ipsos gives us a good picture. Three factors underpin consumer trust in organisations like ours: competence, honesty, and benevolence.

Competence means giving consumers confidence in our scientific expertise and regulatory authority - and trusting us to make sound judgements about food safety.

Honesty means being transparent, even when the information is complicated or inconvenient. It means acknowledging uncertainty rather than hiding it and being consistent in what we say.

And benevolence means being perceived to be acting in the interests of consumers, not of industry, government, or the organisation itself. Consumers need to believe that we are genuinely on their side.

These three drivers interact and reinforce each other and have significant implications for our communications. It means that how we communicate - the tone, the transparency, the consistency - is as important as what we’re saying. It also means that the moments when trust is most tested, during crises and major incidents, are when our communications matter most.

Building trust

So, what does this mean in practice? Our Ipsos research identified a number of factors that actively build or erode trust in a regulator.

Handling crises well is obviously vital. The FSA deals with around 2000 food incidents every year and has 25 years of crisis communications experience. We know all too well that the media plays a significant role in shaping how consumers perceive food risks. Negative coverage can spread quickly and do lasting damage, but if the crisis is handled well, especially in the media spotlight, it can reinforce trust.

If a regulator is seen to act decisively, communicate clearly, and demonstrate concern for consumers, it can emerge from a crisis with its credibility intact or even enhanced.

Endorsement builds trust. Consumers are more likely to trust information when it comes from someone they already trust, a healthcare professional, a teacher, a community leader. This is why the people who amplify our messages matter so much.

A sense of personal control is also significant. Communications that give people clear, actionable information - "here's what to look for, here's what to do" - are more likely to build trust than communications that simply instruct or warn. The FSA’s food hygiene rating scheme is a great example of this. It allows the public to see the hygiene rating of a food business to help them make informed decisions about where they want to eat.

Consistency is essential. Trust is eroded when messages are contradictory, or when official communications are at odds with what people hear from other sources. Consistent information, delivered across multiple channels, reinforces credibility.

Familiarity matters too. People trust what they know and that means being a visible, regular presence, not just appearing when there's a problem. The fact that they see our logo on FHRS ratings frequently when they shop and eat must help here. We need the public to know who we are and what we stand for, so that when we do need to communicate urgently, we're not starting from square one.

Let me bring this to life with a recent example.

Infant formula incident

Earlier this year we responded to a serious food incident involving the potential contamination of batches of infant formula with cereulide, a naturally occurring toxin that can cause vomiting and stomach cramps. I know that many of you here will have been involved in this incident.

Any incident involving risks to babies or children is always especially emotive. For some families, baby formula is the only source of nutrition for their baby. Fear and misinformation can spread rapidly on social media, and parents will, quite rightly, seek information from multiple sources simultaneously.

It's the type of situation you most dread as the head of a food safety authority - having to tell parents they may have fed their young child a contaminated product.

Our approach in this incident has been guided by exactly the principles I've described. We moved quickly to provide reassurance, working with our UK Health Security Agency to give the advice parents needed.

We ensured affected batches were recalled and worked with the retailers and manufacturers so we could give a simple message: check cupboards for recalled products and what's on the shelves is safe to buy.

We communicated transparently about the nature of the risk and worked intensively with industry to ensure that parents could continue to access infant milks. A shortage in the course of managing a safety recall would have created its own serious risks.

The lesson here is that trust is built in advance, through consistent, honest, benevolent communication over time, and it’s tested in the moment. Our ability to respond effectively depended on the credibility we had already established.

Three lessons for regulators

So let me draw this together into three practical takeaways that I hope are useful for all of us, whatever our context:

Firstly, know your audience. Trust is not uniform. Different groups of consumers have different relationships with the food system, different sources of information, and different vulnerabilities. Effective trust-building means understanding who you're talking to and tailoring your approach accordingly.

Secondly, be clear, continuous, and consistent. Trust is built over time, through repeated, coherent engagement. Not just in crises, when there's something to announce. Consistency is what turns messages into an institutional character that people can rely on.

Thirdly, you can’t do this alone. We operate within a much wider ecosystem - of healthcare professionals, retailers, schools, community organisations, industry partners, and fellow regulators. Building the partnerships that allow us to extend our reach and maintaining the credibility that makes others willing to endorse and amplify our messages is critical to our communications.

Conclusion

The uncertainty we face as regulators is real. We can’t control global events, the spread of misinformation, or the political context in which our institutions operate. But we can control how we communicate.

We can choose to be honest even when the picture is complicated; consistent even when it's difficult; and visible and engaged - not just when we have bad news to share. We can work to be a consistent and trustworthy presence in the lives of the people we serve.

Trust in the food system is not something we can take for granted, but something we can earn through the quality of our science, the transparency of our communication, and the care we show for the consumers who depend on us.

In an uncertain world, that is the most important thing we can offer.

Thank you.