Food and Drink (Miscellaneous Amendments Relating to Food and Wine Composition, Information and Labelling) Regulations 2021

Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle Excerpts

Wednesday 19th May 2021 Grand Committee

[Baroness Bennett of Manor Castle (GP) [V]]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to follow the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh of Pickering, as I often seem to do in Committee. I should like to express the Green group’s support for the expert concerns expressed by the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay of Llandaff, both on the issue of allergens and the inadequacy of alcohol labelling.

The policy background paper for this statutory instrument states that the aim is,

“to provide and make use of the same information, presented in the same way as before.”

However, as the Minister said in her introduction, there are real-world implications in the regulations. There are changes in the information that will be available to consumers, which is why your Lordships’ House insisted that this Committee considers this SI, even though it was not considered in the other place. It is clear that it weakens the information going to consumers.

I shall start with honey. We are talking about shifting to a label that states, “A blend of honeys from more than one country”, or similar words. Knowing whether a honey is sourced from within the European Union or the rest of the world is a significant issue for a number of reasons. One issue to which the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay referred is that honey is one of the most faked products in the world—by one ranking the third most-faked product. That problem is most common in countries that produce honey on an industrial scale, notably China. Historically, it was difficult to detect whether alleged honey had been adulterated or contained no honey at all, with substitutes such as corn syrup, rice syrup and palm sugar being used. This is an issue of transparency. Obviously, people should be getting what they actually pay for but this is also an issue of health. Rice syrup contains considerably higher levels of arsenic, which in many cases can be found in drinking water, for example. The fructose in corn syrup has issues around obesity, such as those to which the noble Baroness, Lady Finlay, referred.

There is also the issue of concern to many consumers regarding what bees have been eating to produce the honey and whether, in order to extract unsustainable amounts of honey, they are being fed sugars such as, again, corn syrup, which studies have shown are linked to colony collapse disorder. I note that just last month in the United States, thousands of commercial beekeepers started a major court case, highlighting their concern about the damage being done to them by imports from China.

So I would say that if we are shifting from “produced in the EU” to just “produced in a range of countries”, we are significantly reducing the information, the choice, available to consumers and preventing them making choices about health and the conditions under which their food is produced. While the European arrangements are no doubt far from perfect, they are stronger—there are more controls on the production of honey—than in the US, let alone other countries.

I come to the second group I will address, on meat issues. As the noble Lord, Lord German, mentioned, this brings us to the issue of a free trade deal with Australia. I note that in Prime Minister’s Questions this morning, responding to the right honourable Ian Blackford, the Prime Minister was sending very positive signals about a potential Australian trade deal and suggesting that we could be exporting Scottish beef to Australia. I would have to ask: what is the point in swapping meat, with all the environmental costs of shipping goods, particularly refrigerated goods, around the world? I should perhaps declare my position as an agricultural science graduate from an Australian university who has worked on Australian beef farms, and this really does seem to be sending coals to Newcastle.

Again, we come to non-beef meat and minced meat excluding beef. If we go from a label that says “produced in the EU” to “produced anywhere in the world”, we are providing consumers with less information. Surely this labelling could have been “produced in the UK”, “produced in Europe” or “produced in non-European countries”. Those three labels would have given consumers far better levels of information.