Hidden Dangers

It has been 15 months since we stood outside the Coroner’s court following our daughter, Natasha’s inquest. Like the day she died, it is a time and place forever, painfully engraved in our hearts and in our minds. Natasha died aged 15 from a severe allergic reaction to sesame seeds that were hidden in a baguette. The Coroner blamed inadequate labelling and said that the law was wrong. Her death had been avoidable.

As we read our statement to the cameras outside, we stated that Natasha’s death should “serve as a watershed moment” for food retailers and policymakers to make “meaningful change and to save lives”.

In the intervening months Michael Gove (then Environment Secretary) pushed through, at impressive speed, Natasha’s Law - which requires shops to print full ingredient and allergen labelling onto pre-packaged food.

Many of the half a million restaurants and cafes across the country have already changed their culture. Above all, there has been an awakening across society of the acute dangers faced by the growing millions of people with allergies.

The Times investigation

A fifth of samples taken by food inspectors in the past three years have included an allergen such as peanut or egg that was not disclosed, The Times can reveal. You can find the full article here.

But there remain huge hidden, life-threatening dangers for allergy sufferers which The Times’s investigation has exposed in stark detail.

It’s shocking to us that one-in-five samples taken by local authority inspectors had “undeclared allergens” - meaning that people with allergies are at risk of digesting what to them is in effect a poison.  Without risk-based enforcement by local authorities, this dire situation is only going to get worse.

This is both a policy and regulatory failure. In the pre-austerity world, this sort of data provided by every local council would have been routinely available via the Food Standards Agency.  That it no longer is and has to be dragged out of local authorities through Freedom of Information requests, leaves us deeply worried. 

Resources are needed

With local authorities facing huge cuts in central government funding, inspection of food businesses and enforcement has gone the way of libraries and children’s centres. There simply aren’t enough environmental health and trading standards officers to cover the needs of our towns and cities.

We believe that a “boots on the ground” enforcement policy is a critical feature of the controls needed to enforce allergen policies. That need is greater than ever with the huge rise in young people with allergies, evidenced by NHS Digital figures showing a 72 per cent rise in the number of children hospitalised with anaphylaxis in England over the last six years.

We also believe that dealing and fixing the allergen crisis requires good policy, strong regulation, a collaborative, co-operative approach from all food businesses, and a huge investment in research.

In the weeks and months ahead, this charity we formed last summer in our daughter’s memory, will be announcing a new wave of ground-breaking, open-sourced medical research.

In the meantime, if we are to bring about meaningful change that saves lives, we need to see sweeping cultural changes across the food business, backed up by tough regulation and those ‘boots on the ground’ who are able to enforce it.