In light of initiatives to promote improved regulation at a local Essay

In light of initiatives to promote improved regulation at a local level, critically evaluate the role of food industry self regulation in the future - Essay Example The political parties are actively taking part to propose changes in the UK’s Food Safety Enforcement to protect the consumers and to ensure the compliance of the companies to the effective enforcement system (Jukes, 1993). Although a number of key reforms were made in UK’s food safety regulatory structure in 2002 however, most of these reforms dealt with the changes in the central government arrangement for hygienic and safe food rather than local enforcement. In this report, the self regulation of food industry in the context of its role in future has been discussed. The degree to which an organisation is responsible to manage risks depends on the nature of business. However, in a food industry, the responsibility of the organisation increases because the user of the product manufactured by the food company is at risk. Therefore, the self regulation of food industry is highly encouraged nowadays as compared to other industries. Industry self-regulation is a process that involves an industry – level organisation setting rules and standards with regard to the conduct of firms within the respective industry, (Gunningham and Rees, 1997). In other words, the industry associations or the companies should come up with the policies and minimum standards to avoid risk. In 2002, when the reforms in food safety enforcement of UK were made, the local enforcement remained untouched because it was being considered that state was responsible to ensure the minimum standards and the role of the individual businesses was overlooked. However, nowadays, it is being considered as the responsibility of both the state and the individual companies to determine how the risk can be managed and because of this reason the self regulation of UK food industry has increased. In short, government regulation and self-regulation are not mutually exclusive but rather a part of a continuum or put differently, complementary