Governance and accountability in standards setting

The Soil Association (SA) has been setting organic standards since 1967. Today, the standards have an international reputation and many countries take their lead from us. They are applied to about 70% of the organic food on sale in the UK.

In this context the standards are delivering a public benefit. They give trust and confidence to the increasing number of consumers who wish to buy organic and provide a level playing field for producers who wish to work within organic principles.

Our standards setting system is an example of self-regulation and has worked well. But as the market expands and our responsibilities and profile increase, we believe it is time to review the way we do things.

For these reasons the standards board wished to introduce new governance and accountability mechanisms into our standard setting. We needed to bring them into line with best practice, and provide the level of trust and confidence our public service responsibilities demand.

The aim was to:

• introduce a wider mix of interests onto the standards board;
• have more formal and more pro-active consultation arrangements which are separate from standard setting;
• increase the transparency around our work;
• focus on fewer, bigger standards areas in more thorough, periodic reviews;
• work to a published plan of standards development;
• ensure that we take better care of the many specialists who help us in standards setting.

Update on consultation

We produced a consultation paper which laid out the changes we wanted to make. We invited comments from all our stakeholders to help us ensure that we were making the changes necessary to fulfil our public responsibilities appropriately and efficiently.

The consultation period ended Friday 28 September 2007. The standards board made recommendations [PDF, 66 KB] to the Soil Association council, who approved the new arrangements with implementation starting January 2008.

Find out more
Governance recommendations [PDF, 66 KB]