Horsemeat

Caroline Nokes Excerpts

Tuesday 12th February 2013 Commons Chamber

[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.

[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

On working with horse passport agencies and the national equine database, does the hon. Lady agree that NED was actually far more of a competition, progeny and pedigree record, and that it would not have been possible to find out whether a horse on it had bute?

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[Caroline Nokes (Romsey and Southampton North) (Con)]

It is slightly challenging to follow the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy), who produced one of the best cases for vegetarianism that I have ever heard.

I fear that I shall veer off into some specifics, given my experience of working for a passport-issuing organisation and the fact that I understand just a little about the way in which horse passports are issued and the value or otherwise of the national equine database. I apologise in advance if what I say becomes a bit too specific for Members, but I think that that the House needs clarification of the problems and benefits of horse passports and also of the function of the database, which did nothing to assist traceability and the establishment of what drugs might or might not have been given to equines. However, I agree with the Secretary of State that the most important aspect of all this is public health and public confidence in our foodstuffs.

I entirely endorse the policy of 100% testing of the carcases of horses that have been slaughtered in the United Kingdom for phenylbutazone, or bute. It is impossible to establish whether a horse has been fed bute by looking at its passport. The hon. Member for Wakefield (Mary Creagh) suggested that horses might have been injected with bute, but only very rarely is the substance administered intravenously. It is fed to horses in feedstuff. Not only is the possibility of cross-contamination incredibly likely, but bute is a very useful drug which is often given to horses that are elderly or slightly lame. It prolongs their useful life, and enables them to enjoy a better quality of life.

Bute is also extremely cheap, which means that, among both veterinary surgeons and horse owners, it is incredibly popular. If the life of a much-loved family pony can be extended by a further five or 10 years by one sachet of bute a day, those sachets will be administered. However, therein lies some of the problem. Bute is readily available from veterinary surgeons. While I would not suggest that horse owners are irresponsible, if a ready supply is prescribed for one horse—as might happen in the case that I have identified—what is to prevent me from giving it to another horse?

I have here a wonderful British horse passport, which should provide a complete veterinary record of every drug and vaccination given to that much-loved pony, but there is no record of its ever having been given bute in its life. It is absolute nonsense to suggest that the horse passport system will somehow inform those at the slaughterhouse of whether the pony has been given bute or not.

I commend the last Government for introducing the horse passport regulations, and for tightening them in 2009 with the introduction of microchipping. That was an important step forward, However, it is important to remember that the microchipping of foals was compulsory only from 2009 onwards. The odds of any horse over the age of four or five being chipped are fairly long. A competition horse that is regularly used and transported around the country, if it has been measured by the Joint Measurement Board, will have been microchipped, but that is unlikely to apply to an ordinary pony that has stood in the New Forest for many years of its life, or has been kept at home and not used in competitions. A horse that is presented for slaughter may or may not have a microchip.

The hon. Member for Wakefield said that it was perfectly legal to buy a microchip on the internet for 12p. That is true, but it is illegal to insert the chip into an equine. The check is there, but I would argue that it is much more common for horses to be presented at UK slaughterhouses without a microchip, and with a passport that may or may not have come from a recognised stud book. I can show the House two passports. One is fully pukka, and has come from a fantastic, historic equine charity—the oldest in the country—and the other is Irish, for a beast that has been through goodness knows how many sales in Ireland. However, it is the British passport that does not show that drugs have been administered, and the Irish one that does.

Let me now say something about the national equine database. There are some 1.3 million horses in the United Kingdom, some of which were registered on the database and some of which were not. I do not know whether the hon. Lady ever looked at NED, but I did. It had a fantastic competition record, but it did not show where a horse had been kept, what drugs had been administered or what the horse had been used for. There was simply no way of telling.

I personally lament the loss of NED because I cannot establish whether a competition record has been recorded accurately and therefore cannot boast about the potential and ability of a pony, but did the database show where I kept the pony? No. There are 10,000 licensed livery yards in the UK and many more unlicensed yards, and only about 70% of those 1.3 million horse owners keep their horses at home. There are, of course, all the other horses all around the country which may be in racehorse training or may be show jumpers or eventers. NED was utterly useless at showing where a horse was at any one time and what drugs had been administered to it.

I have made the plea that we should not necessarily regard phenylbutazone as an evil. It is not; it is a very useful drug. However, we must ensure that it is not in the human food chain, and the only way to do that is to adopt 100% testing. I would argue that given what has gone on abroad, all meat coming into this country should be tested. Who knows what has happened in Romanian slaughterhouses, and in slaughterhouses in other parts of the continent?

I am slightly disappointed that my hon. Friend the Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) is no longer present, because I think that she has done some fantastic work on the transport of live animals and on live exports, which I think play a massive part in this debate. We must reach a point—although who knows how it can be achieved with the European Union?—at which animals are transported for far shorter distances and are not crossing an entire continent, and we can consider not only food traceability and safety but the welfare of those animals.