Had a great meeting just outside Nottingham last week with around 80 local food business representatives, and was joined by Rob Howard, the Agency's regional co-ordinator for the East Midlands. I talked about science quite a bit, but the audience were also interested in our role as a regulator, our work on salt and front-of-pack labelling and our handling of food incidents.
We're actually doing some workshops with local businesses on incident prevention at the moment, so I updated the audience on that. It's good to get out and about and talk about science in the context of our work as a regulator. There was a good discussion of the issues after I'd finished speaking, which included how we communicate with the media. I'd been keen to do more events of this kind around the country as I find it really valuable.
Having Rob there, too, was good. Our English regional offices, now a year old, are developing a strong local presence and have a handle on issues as they affect local communities. There's a paper on the regional units going to our next open Board meeting, coincidentally being held in Nottingham on 17 May. We'll be publishing the papers later this month and you can, of course, attend in person or watch the webcast if you want to find out more.