Horsemeat

David Heath Excerpts

Tuesday 12th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath)]

No, we did not.

[Mary Creagh]

The hon. Gentleman was not in the Department at that time.

The FSA website has chapter and verse on what happened. It says that in July 2010

“the food authenticity programme was transferred from the…(FSA) to Defra along with food labelling and composition policy not related to food safety or nutrition. The food authenticity programme supports the enforcement of food labelling and standards legislation through the development of methods that can determine whether foods are correctly labelled. Food authenticity…simply refers to whether the food purchased by the consumer matches its description.”

I would say that consumers who are purchasing beef burgers that later turn out to be horse would fall within that remit. The Government removed the budget and brought the 25 officials responsible for labelling the content of food back into DEFRA. In response to my parliamentary questions, we find that there are now just 12 officials working on food authenticity in DEFRA. The Secretary of State is responsible for the labelling that tells us what is in our food, the Department of Health is responsible for nutritional labelling, and the FSA for allergen labelling. That is why the official food sampling survey is a joint DEFRA-FSA survey, is it not? Will the Secretary of State confirm that this will be the very first survey of product content that his Department has carried out since his Government removed compositional labelling responsibilities from the Food Standards Agency in June 2010?

This ideological Government, who want to deregulate everything, actually created a bureaucratic nightmare for the food industry when they fragmented the FSA’s responsibility for labelling, because now manufacturers have to go to the Department of Health to look at calories, fat, salt and sugar, to the FSA to look at allergens, and to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs for what it should say on the tin.

Has the loss of more than 700 trading standards officers in three years made this type of consumer fraud more widespread and less likely to be detected? Is the Secretary of State confident that the FSA’s Meat Hygiene Service, which has just been merged into the FSA, can be cut by £12 million over the four years from 2010 to 2014 without affecting its ability to detect breaches of the law or to tackle a disease outbreak?

On abattoirs, at DEFRA questions nearly three weeks ago, I asked the Minister with responsibility for food, the hon. Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath), whom I am glad to see in his place, about problems with the horse passport system. I was concerned that horses contaminated with bute were being slaughtered in UK abattoirs and entering the human food chain. Of the nine UK horses that tested positive for bute in 2012, one was stopped, five went to France, two to the Netherlands and one to the UK. Has the Minister considered the possibility that horses are going from UK abattoirs into the food chain?

The FSA sampled 156 horses for bute out of the 9,405 horses that were slaughtered in UK abattoirs in 2012. Nine of those horses tested positive, which is a 6% positive rate. If we scale that up to the 9,000 figure, we will see that it suggests that more than 500 horses contaminated with bute may have entered the UK human food chain last year. I raised that point two and a half weeks ago, but received a garbled response from the Minister. I am glad to see that he has stopped burbling now.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Tom Harris (Glasgow South) (Lab)]

This has been an important and well-informed debate, and I wish to thank some Members individually for taking part. The hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), my hon. Friend the Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson), the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams), the hon. Members for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) and for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes), my hon. Friend the Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner) and the hon. Members for Sherwood (Mr Spencer) and for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) all made excellent speeches.

There can be few subjects more important to us as individuals than what we eat and what we feed to our children and family. I am only sorry that the Secretary of State was too busy to listen to a single speech made after his own.

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath)]

It is important that I put it on the record that the Secretary of State is having the phone meeting with the Dutch Minister that he mentioned to the House. It is also important that we make those connections.

--- Later in debate ---

[The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Mr David Heath)]

In the few moments I have to respond, I should say that this has been a broadly measured and constructive debate, as is entirely appropriate on such a serious issue. It has occasionally been slightly marred by Opposition Front Benchers who wished to introduce a party political element and seemed blithely oblivious to the fact that the systems in place are now precisely the same as those under the previous Government.

My view is that this is a shared problem and shared response. The problem is shared between the Government, the House, the food companies and the regulators. It is now shared among countries across Europe that are either implicated or the victims of what may or may not be criminal behaviour. It is shared by the police and investigating authorities, which are now looking into what would appear to be—I make that qualification—significant and widespread criminality. I hope that we also share the conviction that there is only one group whose interests are paramount: the consumer, who has been cheated in having taken off the shelf something that was not what was described on the label.

Despite the occasional rhetorical swoops, there was sufficient common cause across the House. I have looked carefully at the Opposition motion, most of which is a recital of fact and therefore unexceptional. However, one part of it is wrong and suggests the Opposition’s current frame of mind. They call on the

“Government to ensure that police and fraud specialists investigate the criminal networks involved”.

It is not for the Government in this country to instruct the police on what they should investigate. It is certainly not for the Government in this country to place requirements on police authorities in other member states as to what they should investigate. On that basis, I invite my colleagues not to support the motion, but I will nevertheless acknowledge the extent to which we agree.

Let me deal with some of the individual contributions. The hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), who I understand has had to go to a—

[Barry Gardiner]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mr Heath]

No, because the hon. Member for Glasgow South (Mr Harris) took up all my time.

The hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton raised a very important issue that was mentioned by many others, including my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams) and the hon. Members for Sherwood (Mr Spencer) and for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish): the importance of the traceability of meat in this country and the systems we have in place. It is incredibly important to emphasise that so far not the slightest suspicion has been raised that cut meat produced in this country is anything other than of very high quality indeed, and we should take some comfort from that.

The hon. Lady also mentioned trace contamination. We need to look at whether DNA contamination of less than 1% is anything other than environmental contamination that is below a certain threshold. We are taking advice on that, because it is very important that we do not suggest that something is adulterated when, for instance, it has merely been sitting on a butcher’s shelf next to the meat of another species. We have to be careful about that.

The hon. Member for West Bromwich East (Mr Watson) raised some important points. I will look very carefully at what he said to see whether there is substance there that we need to pursue. My hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire talked about fraud on a European scale and the importance of the police investigation. I absolutely agree.

The hon. Member for Hackney North and Stoke Newington (Ms Abbott) talked about the importance of the consumer, which I mentioned right at the beginning. She then drew some questionable conclusions in terms of public health, but I know that she did so because she wants for her constituents the same assurance that I want for mine. I want my constituents and her constituents to be absolutely assured that food on our supermarket shelves is safe to eat. Safety is the first priority, and then we need composition tests to make sure that it is what it says it is. The tests that we have carried out so far have not given any cause for concern on safety grounds, and she needs to take that back to her constituency.

The hon. Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) took a global view of food prices and raised very important points. The hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) gave a graphic description of some of the processes that are used in the processed meat industry. May I distinguish between what she said and what the hon. Member for Glasgow South said later about mince? Having a higher fat content in mince—British mince has always had it—does not mean that we should describe it as something else. I am sorry, but I do not think it is helpful to the consumer to say, “This is no longer mince—it is mince with fat and collagen added,” or something of that kind. That is the point of the consultation on composition that we are carrying out.

The hon. Member for Romsey and Southampton North (Caroline Nokes) spoke with great knowledge about horse passports and the national equine database. She said, as I have said repeatedly, that the national equine database did nothing whatsoever in terms of traceability. If we want to improve the passport system—I think there is a strong case for doing so—we need to look at it not on that basis but on the basis of how passports are issued and their content.

The hon. Member for Glasgow South talked about an issue of timing to do with the Food Safety Authority of Ireland and said that the Food Standards Agency had failed to react. He suggested that the Food Standards Authority of Ireland acted on the basis of intelligence. Let me tell him that it explicitly rejects the suggestion that it was working on the basis of an intelligence-based system, and therefore it was not operating on the basis of suspicion that there was adulteration of material going into the UK. As soon as it had confirmed results, it shared them with the FSA and the FSA shared them with the Government, and we have then had the process that is continuing. We like to work on the basis of evidence before bringing prosecutions, and we like to give the evidence to the police. [Interruption.] I am answering the question; indeed, that is the answer. They did not suspect that adulterated meat was going into the UK; they did a routine test and notified us when they had adverse results.

This House needs to send a message to food businesses that their credibility and reputation are on the line. They need to take the actions that we have agreed with them and, on the issue of convoluted and labyrinthine food supply networks, they ought to consider whether provenance is not a more important issue than profits. I think that they may need to learn that lesson.

The message to regulators is that we need to ensure that systems in place across Europe work effectively. We need to look at our own systems to see whether they can work better, including the horse passport system, and we need to consider whether the intelligence-based approach needs to be supplemented by regular audit.

The message to consumers is that they have a right to be sold what it says on the label and a right to products on the supermarket shelf that are, whatever the selling price, safe, wholesome and genuine. The regulatory authorities, the Government and everybody else involved with this—principally the retailers—have to provide the evidence for that and reassure our consumers.

Question put.