The Food Standards Agency has collected one of three inaugural awards offered by the Institute of Regulation and has been highly commended in another category.
Modelled on the Civil Service Awards, the IoR accolades were presented at the institute’s annual conference last week.
FSA deputy director for innovation policy Tom Vincent collected the “rising star” award in recognition of his work establishing an innovation hub at the food safety and hygiene watchdog.
Announcing the category winner, Care Quality Commission policy and strategy director Joyce Frederick said Vincent had “transformed” his area of work – in novel and innovative food products.
She said Vincent had designed inspirational training programmes around food safety and had been a public representative and spokesperson for the FSA on food safety and some of the “more challenging areas” the watchdog operates in.
She added that Vincent had also secured £1.6m in funding to “sandbox” previously untested areas, such as gene-edited crops.
Accepting the award, Vincent thanked his FSA colleagues. “The work we're doing really is a team effort,” he said. “To think creatively and inclusively about how we regulate and protect the public has really been something the team has been thinking about for a long time.”
Ofqual senior economist Hisham Alhassan was highly commended in the “rising star” category for his exceptional talent, clarity of thinking and ability to drive innovation through data analysis and hypothesis.
The NHS Health Research Authority, which is an arm’s-length body of the Department of Health and Social Care, won the “collaborative practice” award, announced on 27 March.
It was presented in recognition of the HRA’s ongoing work to bring together the health and social care research sectors and maximise the collective impact on research.
Judges were particularly impressed with the HRA’s approach to partnership working, which they said had made a measurable difference to faster approvals, efficiency and stronger public involvement.
IoR chair Marcial Boo said the HRA was “an outstanding example of a regulator cutting through complexity and fostering true collaboration across several organisations to reduce regulatory friction, with demonstrable benefits for the NHS and the economy”.
The Care Quality Commission was highly commended in the “collaborative practice” category for its work on the inspection of safe houses for victims of modern slavery.
The Information Commissioner’s Office won the IoR “innovative practice” award for its privacy-notice generator. The tool enables small and medium-sized organisations to create a tailored privacy notice – and, in the process, comply with legal requirements to let people know what information is held on them and what will be done with it.
The ICO team set itself a target to improve website visits by 20%, compared with the page where guidance on privacy notices was previously located. Instead it achieved a 105% increase.
Similarly, the team was hoping for a 20% conversion rate to generated notices, but achieved 53%.
The FSA was highly commended in the category for its “enterprise-level” regulatory initiative, which has taken a step back from the traditional approach of looking at supermarkets and other shops as individual sites, choosing to focus on the whole business.
The result has seen data aggregated and analysed at enterprise level, hugely reducing the effort associated with low-level inspections – but also providing better insight.