Horsemeat

Debate between Andy McDonald and Steve Reed

Wednesday 30th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Steve Reed]

I do agree. The problem is that consumers cannot be sure what is going into the product they are buying for consumption by them and their family. I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention.

First, we have to ask whether the Food Standards Agency is still fit for purpose. Let us not forget that it was the Irish authorities and not our own that exposed the problem of horsemeat in beefburgers. Our system has been fragmented by the Government as part of a drive to deregulate. Labelling, food composition, nutrition and food safety used to be dealt with by a single agency and are now handled by three: the Department of Health, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the FSA. That fragmentation and additional bureaucracy make it much more likely that problems will be missed.

Standards in the British food industry are high, and it is vital that those standards and that reputation are not undermined by the Government’s actions. The FSA’s budget has been cut by £11 million over the past year alone, reducing its capacity to detect contaminated food. At the same time, the swingeing scale of Government cuts to local government has seen funding for local trading standards services plummet by a third from £213 million in 2011-12 to around £140 million this year.

[Andy McDonald (Middlesbrough) (Lab)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Does he agree that the Government’s scrapping of the national equine database was sheer folly? We have the risk of bute entering the food chain, but, putting that to one side, any savings that may have been made by scrapping the database have been totally dwarfed by the commercial and financial damage to the food industry.

[Steve Reed]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I will come on to the national equine database and the risks that its scrapping has created for consumers and the industry. I thank him for his welcome intervention.

On local trading standards services, a freedom of information request by the trade union Unison exposed the fact that 743 trading standards jobs have been lost since 2010, resulting in fewer inspections and, consequently, higher risks for the public. Unison has questioned whether councils still have the resources they need to do the job. It is not enough for the Government to blame councils for cutting those services when the Government have cut councils’ funding to such a huge extent in the first place.