My Lords, I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, for raising this important matter. I acknowledge that there is considerable experience of the Food Standards Agency in your Lordships’ House. We support, in principle, the proposal to increase the investigative powers available to the National Food Crime Unit. The fraud cases of which we have been made aware by the chair of the Food Standards Agency, Professor Susan Jebb—as referred to by the noble Lord—are truly shocking.
Food crime is a very serious issue, with fraud in our food supply chains costing billions of pounds each year. The National Food Crime Unit, which was established to investigate these crimes, should be empowered to tackle them, to improve the response to these cases and to reduce the burden on its colleagues in law enforcement. As such, we are still committed to working with the Food Standards Agency and DHSC, its sponsoring department, on extending certain Police and Criminal Evidence Act powers to the National Food Crime Unit. However, in doing so, we need to work through the implications of this. It may assist the noble Lord if I briefly set out some of the issues we think we would need to explore further.
First, the exercise of any PACE powers by the National Food Crime Unit must be necessary, proportionate and legitimate. As such, it is important that there are suitable governance, accountability, oversight, investigations and complaints arrangements in place, as there are for the police. The National Food Crime Unit is not a statutory body, nor does it have a separate legal identity. Oversight, governance and the complaints processes sit with the Food Standards Agency board, which commissions independent reviews and facilitates a complaints process which ultimately reports to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman. There is therefore no formal independent oversight.
There is also a lack of clarity on the necessary protocols when PACE powers would be exercised, including in relation to post-incident procedures on seizure, retention and evaluation of evidence, and the treatment of arrested persons without police presence. These are all issues which, I have no doubt, can be resolved but I am sure noble Lords would agree on the necessity of ensuring that the appropriate accountability and governance arrangements are in place, given that we are dealing with intrusive powers of the state. As such, we do not believe that it would be appropriate to extend the search and seizure powers in PACE to the National Food Crime Unit without further consultation on the issues I have described. I do not think the noble Lord, Lord Paddick, misses very much, but that is the answer to his question.
I reassure the noble Lord, Lord Rooker, that we are committed to taking this work forward with the Food Standards Agency. I do not have a specific answer to the question of the noble Lord, Lord Rosser, on where the dialogue is at the moment. On that basis, I hope that the noble Lord will be content to withdraw his amendment.