Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many inspections the Food Standards Agency has undertaken of businesses involved in the production of meat in each year since 2010; and how many of those inspections reported the presence of salmonella.

All animals and poultry slaughtered in approved premises are subjected to Food Standard Agency (FSA) inspection. From 2013 the FSA started a regime of routine unannounced inspections in those approved meat cutting and processing premises in England and Wales where there is no permanent FSA presence as part of the meat establishments audit programme.

The following table shows the unannounced inspections across England and Wales from 2013 when FSA started recording the data.

The FSA does not routinely test for the presence of salmonella in slaughtered animals as it is the Food Business Operator’s (FBO) responsibility to test, record, and take any necessary action on Salmonella test results. The FSA is responsible for ensuring the FBO is discharging this responsibility. The reported inspections are held within FBO records themselves, rather than the FSA.

The FSA publishes Salmonella testing results from pigs as part of a specific FBO testing programme for FBO producing more than 37,500 pigs per year. The following link illustrates the published results that are used for the Multi-Annual National Control Plan (MANCP report):

https://data.food.gov.uk/catalog/datasets/5137a587-4b88-4981-9dfe-e2623151e2a9