Horsemeat

Debate between Angus Brendan MacNeil and Mary Creagh

Tuesday 12th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mary Creagh]

We are none the wiser about whether the Secretary of State knows the names of these companies, which prompts the question of whether the FSA has told him or whether he has asked it. Perhaps he will clarify that.

On Friday the FSA said that the police were involved, and I thought that things were under control. However, on Friday night the Met police said that they had had talks with the FSA but there was no live criminal investigation. Will the Secretary of State tell us what action the FSA has taken against these companies? Has it been into their premises and seized evidence, and why have the police not been called in? If there are no problems with these companies, will he say so clearly now, on the record?

Last Thursday, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs announced its statutory testing regime, with 28 local councils purchasing and testing eight samples each. However, the Secretary of State cannot seriously expect people to wait 10 weeks for the results. Does he think that surveying just 224 products across the country rises to the challenge of this scandal when he has asked the supermarkets to test thousands of their products by Friday? How many of the 10 million withdrawn burgers have been tested? Are there any plans to test them now? If they had been tested when they were withdrawn, Ministers would able to reassure us or tell us the extent of this scandal, but because they were paralysed by fear or incompetence, or both, we are still in the dark. Will the Secretary of State confirm that only a fraction of the supermarket tests will be completed and reported by this Friday?

Will the Secretary of State tell the House how many products the large public sector catering suppliers will test and how many product lines members of the British Meat Processors Association will test? Yesterday I asked him which members of the British Hospitality Association and the British Retail Consortium have withdrawn their products as a precaution and whether any of them have withdrawn products that may have gone to schools and hospitals. Is he prepared to answer those questions today?

[Mr Angus Brendan MacNeil (Na h-Eileanan an Iar) (SNP)]

As a crofter and a producer, I should refer to my entry in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests. I am pleased to say that the butchers in Stornoway have seen an upturn in trade as a result of this problem. It surely beggars belief that it has happened given all the tagging that has been going on in the industry. When I send a couple of beasts—lambs—to my cousin to be slaughtered, the vet has to see them. Surely we should now be pressurising the supermarkets and major retailers to stock from as close to source locally as possible—the best of Scottish lamb, beef, or whatever—to make sure that we do not have a repetition of this situation.

[Mary Creagh]

I share the hon. Gentleman’s concerns for the British meat industry. As he says, we have one of the strongest food traceability systems in the world. The British Retail Consortium’s food traceability system and authorisation of processing plant is recognised to global standards. What I worry about is the very large worldwide web that has led to some Findus products coming in from Romania via Cyprus, the Netherlands and a company in south-west France. It is inexplicable to me why that meat is being transported to all those different areas and what is happening there. Every time it is transported, there are moments of risk when it can be interfered with. That is where the problems arise in the meat trade rather than at the stage that the hon. Gentleman mentioned.

--- Later in debate ---

[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.

[Mr MacNeil]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving way again; she is being very kind. What is her view on placing dye on meats that are not meant to go into the human food chain? That would give a clear visual signal and would probably prevent an awful lot of meats from finding their way into the human food chain, whether they come from the knacker’s yard or any other source.

[Mary Creagh]

I do not know how condemned meat is currently dealt with, but I have heard tales of people bleaching meat. Whatever happens to this meat, when it is condemned it needs to be permanently removed from the food chain. Clearly, something much more significant needs to happen to it, but the treatment of condemned meat is something that I am not fully aware of at the moment. I am sure I will learn a lot more about it in the next 24 hours.

As the hon. Member for North Antrim (Ian Paisley) said, there is evidence of an illegal trade in horses from Ireland to the UK and a programme on the subject will be aired tonight. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals has also contacted me to say that it has seen horses that have been double microchipped and double passported in order to “clean” the horse. It has also given me examples of horses being microchipped at auction—many horses do not contain a microchip—and given a clean passport. Microchips can be bought for as little as 12p on the internet and it is clearly not an offence to buy one. If a microchip is put into a horse and a passport obtained from one of the 75 societies that can issue horse passports in the UK, the new passport can be linked to the microchip so that the horse looks like it has a clean history.

The increase in the number of horses and the decrease in horse prices mean that putting horses into the food chain is attractive. At the abattoir, Government inspectors check only the microchip with the passport, and if they correspond, the horse is slaughtered and allowed into the food chain. I am glad that, as of yesterday, all horses being slaughtered in UK abattoirs are now being tested for bute, but the Minister should have acted on that two weeks ago, when I first raised the issue in the House. The passport system is clearly not working as it should. The lack of a central database and DEFRA’s decision to stop funding it in 2012 only adds to the lack of visibility of where the horses are and their bute status. Does the Secretary of State regret scrapping the national equine database to save £200,000? [Interruption.] The Minister says no—I think he might regret that. [Interruption.] I look forward to hearing what the Government’s traceability system actually is.