Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, how many local authorities have not conducted any sampling to check food composition over the last 12 months.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) collects food law enforcement monitoring returns from local authorities annually. Data for the period 1 April 2013 to 31 March 2014 is currently being collected. Following collation and analysis, the FSA plans to publish this data in November 2014.

The FSA advises that the following local authorities did not report any food composition sampling in 2012-13 via the Local Authority Enforcement Monitoring System (LAEMS):

Armagh

Birmingham

Blackburn

Bolton

Darlington

Isle of Wight

Leicester City

Plymouth City

Redcar and Cleveland

Rochdale

Rutland

South Lanarkshire

Swindon

Tameside

All of these authorities reported taking other labelling or microbiological samples in 2012-13.

A table has been placed in the Library which shows how many food standards samples (composition and labelling) each local authority reported via LAEMS in 2012-13, together with a comparison against the number reported in 2011-12 and how many food standards samples each local authority reported through a FSA-funded project.

All of the reported food standards samples were official samples and would have been submitted to the local authority's appointed Public Analyst for analysis. Out of 22,055 food standards samples in 2012-13, 4,387 were funded by the FSA, all other food standards samples would have been paid for by the local authority. By comparison, in 2011-12, the FSA funded 5,072 out of 21,970 food standards samples.

For some local authorities, the FSA funded sampling figure is larger than the number included in the LAEMS report. The difference will be due to the LAEMS reports only including samples for which the analytical result was received from the Public Analyst before 31 March 2013.