Horsemeat

Glyn Davies Excerpts

Wednesday 30th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Steve Reed]

I will make progress, if I may. I have taken several interventions already.

Those failures of Government threaten the very high reputation of the UK food industry. The NFU has spoken out clearly for a more robust system, with clearer labelling of ingredients in products, and a new requirement that processed meat products should display the species of meat and meat derivatives alongside the country of origin. On the difficulties in tracking the source of horse DNA in burgers, the NFU has called for a review into how the origin of meat is identified and maintained throughout the trade and between different countries. The Government should adopt that proposal, and I hope the Minister will respond to that in his speech.

My contention is that the Government have underfunded, fragmented and undermined the food safety system. We must reassure consumers that the meat they buy is correctly labelled, legal and safe to eat. The Government’s actions, driven by cuts and an ideological pursuit of deregulation, made the latest food crisis more likely and mean that it could happen again.

[Glyn Davies (Montgomeryshire) (Con)]

Like many others, I think that the debate is hugely important, and with my background in the livestock industry I know what the concerns are there. Does the hon. Gentleman agree that the reason the issue has come to the fore—and we are pleased that it has—is the improved testing in Ireland, which is, essentially, where the problem arose? We should congratulate the Irish Government on raising the bar for testing. It would be encouraging if testing of that standard could happen in as many countries as possible, including ours.

[Mr Reed]

I agree with the hon. Gentleman; the standards of testing in Ireland seem to be admirable, and we should replicate that in the UK.

In summary, it is time for the Government to review the whole system and take urgent action to restore consumer confidence in the meat products that we buy and eat, for the benefit of consumers, retailers and the food industry in the United Kingdom.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Gray]

I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman, and am about to discuss trading standards, and how we can restore consumer confidence. If consumers believe that what they buy is different from what the packet says, they will stop buying it. That damages not only dodgy products—and I think some supermarkets have been guilty, under commercial pressure, of buying products at a lower price than they might reasonably have done—but also first-class ones. I agree with the hon. Member for Croydon North about the importance of strong local trading standards, a strong Food Standards Agency, and strong Government controls, to ensure that the highest possible standards for food are maintained in supermarkets. That applies particularly in the present case to meat, and particularly beef, in the context of horse-contaminated products. I agree with the broad thrust of the hon. Gentleman’s speech, and I look forward to hearing from my hon. Friend the Minister how we can be certain to restore consumer confidence.

I want, however, to touch on an aspect of the opening speech that I disagreed with; the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) also touched on the same point in an intervention. The suggestion seemed to be that if the system in the UK for the control of the killing of horses were somehow better, incidents such as the recent one would be less likely. The hon. Member for Croydon North mentioned the Government’s recent abolition of the national equine database and the operation of horse passports. I remember a debate in this very Chamber in 2005 when my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr Cameron) argued passionately that horse passports were a complete waste of time, and committed himself to abolishing them when he came to power. I keep reminding the Prime Minister of that, and he has not yet got round to it, but I am confident that sooner or later he may go down that track.

The idea behind the introduction of horse passports was that every medicine administered to a horse would be stamped on the passport. In particular, as the hon. Member for Croydon North mentioned, bute is a common medicine—and not only among racehorses, as he mentioned; often ordinary hacks will be given bute. That is or could be harmful to human beings. It is important that those horses should not go into the food chain. Abattoirs should know if horses have taken it, and prevent that from happening. The idea was that every horse—there are getting on for 2 million of them in the UK; we do not quite know the number—should have a passport. Every time it went to the vet the passport would be stamped, and when it appeared at the abattoir the staff would say, “No, Mr Horse, you have had bute. You can’t come in here. Please go away.”

From the start, that was a ridiculously flawed principle. The basic flaw is that although a horse owner such as me might be persuaded to buy a horse passport on first getting the horse, it is difficult to remember to cancel it when the horse dies. Already, roughly half of 750,000 horse passports in circulation in the UK today are for dead horses. The document is entirely meaningless, and a great many horses—particularly low-value ones, belonging to various groups of people—have no passports at all. The system is blown wide open. Decent, sensible, ordinary horse owners get round to buying them. People who try, criminally, to get their horses into the human consumption chain do not, so the system does not work.

That system failure was compounded by the national equine database. I must pick up the hon. Member for Croydon North on one point: of course the NED did not cost the Government anything. It was the passport-issuing authorities that paid for it. Abolishing it did not save any money; it was abolished because it was not working. An enormous computer, with a list of animals on it that die at the rate of 100,000 a year and are born all over the place, without anyone knowing where they live, is a worthless piece of bureaucracy. It cannot keep an accurate record of where all the horses are. It did not work. It did not even begin to do so, or come close to it. The Government sensibly realised that. I hope that they will go further at some stage and abolish horse passports, challenging the European Union in doing so, but that is another debate.

[Glyn Davies]

I have taken the same view of horse passports as my hon. Friend, because I knew they would not work. Does he agree that the issue is particularly relevant where there are many wild horses? Because of the bureaucracy affecting passports and ownership, and fear of in some way getting into trouble, the likelihood of their being got rid of when they die is far greater. That is one reason why the whole industry is not run properly. That is particularly relevant in places such as north Wales, where there are huge numbers of wild horses.

[Mr Gray]

My hon. Friend makes an extremely important point, and I was about to move on to it. He speaks for north Wales, where there is a large problem, but it is also a problem across the rest of England—less so in Scotland and elsewhere in the UK.

The fact of the matter is that the NED and horse passports cannot, by definition, prevent horse medicines from getting into the human food chain in the UK; neither can they prevent horsemeat from entering it. They do not work, but there is a simple solution. Only about 7,500, or perhaps 8,500, horses a year go to the one or two functioning UK abattoirs that still take them, which is an incredibly small percentage of the 100,000 or so horses that die each year. Horses are generally shot by a vet, and either buried on a farm or given to packs of foxhounds to consume. The latter is a common way of disposing of horse carcases, with a very small number indeed of horses going to an abattoir. All horses that do go to an abattoir are exported overseas on the hook, as it were, for eating in Italy and elsewhere.

Many purists who think that eating a horse is a disgusting idea, would say, “Fine. Let us abolish the killing of horses in the UK. There is a very small number, so let us just abolish the abattoirs.” That would also abolish the need for horse passports, because if someone could not take their horse to an abattoir they would not need a passport to prove that it had not taken bute in the previous couple of years.

That is a possible solution, but either way, I do not believe that the way in which the horse passport regime, the NED and the UK abattoirs work has anything to do with the scandal of horsemeat in burgers. That came from elsewhere in the world, and no one is suggesting that UK abattoirs were somehow feeding horsemeat into burgers in the supermarkets. Saying that the horse passport system is somehow bad, that the NED should not have been abolished or something about abattoirs in the UK has nothing to do with what we are discussing, so I want to press the Minister on this matter.

If the Government have a primary duty to consumers, it must be to say to them, first, “What you are buying in the supermarkets is what you believe you are buying.” What it says on the tin must be what they find inside the box, and if that is not the case there is a slippage somewhere, whether with the Food Standards Agency, local trading standards or elsewhere. Secondly, the Government must be able to tell consumers that the product is of the highest possible quality. Our farmers depend on the consumer relying on top-quality supermarket products, and the moment the consumer—because they are Muslim or do not like eating horses, or for another reason—begins to believe that a product might somehow be contaminated, they will stop buying it, and that has an extraordinarily bad knock-on effect on our nation’s food producers.

The Government have an absolutely fundamental duty to discover what went wrong in this case, to put it right, and to consider whether the newly established supermarket ombudsman might have a role to play, possibly in examining how purchases are made. In all events, I want to be able to say to consumers in my constituency, “What you buy in supermarkets is exactly what you think you are buying and it is of the highest possible quality. There is no possibility of cross-contamination, from horsemeat or in any other way, and you will get precisely what it says on the tin.”

I congratulate the hon. Member for Croydon North on securing this important debate, and I very much hope that when my hon. Friend the Minister responds he will be able to put at rest the minds not only of consumers across my constituency of North Wiltshire but of the food producers there too.

--- Later in debate ---

[Jim Shannon]

I do not always have solutions to the issues that come along. I hope the Government, in whom we have confidence, can provide some of those solutions. I know one thing: when it comes to cheaper products, we need a guarantee that there will be monitoring of what takes place.

My constituency is no different from any other. I represent people who buy something because it is cheaper, and many people who buy cheaper perhaps do not fit into the physical, visual strata of being well off.

[Glyn Davies]

I hope the hon. Gentleman agrees that we should not create an impression that, just because a product is cheaper, in some way it is of poorer quality, because that is not the case. We need a system whereby what is said on the tin is what is actually in the tin. Just because a product has been produced more cheaply using cheaper cuts, that does not mean it is an inferior product.

[Jim Shannon]

I accept that point. Cheaper does not always mean that the quality is inferior, but—this is why we are having this debate—we must underline where the labelling on the tin or the package has not been correct. That is the point. We need councils or the Government to oversee a system in which labels stating that a product is sourced in Northern Ireland or the United Kingdom mean that the product comes from Northern Ireland or the United Kingdom, not on a lorry into an abattoir in the middle of England from across Europe because that would not be entirely accurate. We want to address those things.

We must ensure that steps are taken to ensure that produce is clearly marked with the country of origin, country of packaging and exactly what the product is made of. As the hon. Gentleman says, that what it says on the tin is what is in the tin, and that what it says on the packet is what is in the packet. The best way to do that is by buying locally. I know the price squeezes that large chains put on local farmers make it hard to survive, which is why I have always supported the idea of a supermarket ombudsman or regulator. Perhaps the Minister could give us some indication of whether there is a role for the ombudsman or regulator. I suspect everyone in the Chamber has pushed for the groceries code adjudicator, for instance, and the Government have committed to introducing that. Is there a role for the adjudicator? If there is, perhaps that is how we can address the issue.

The price gap from field to plate is increasing, and as the price of fuel increases the farmers once again feel the brunt. Too often, supermarkets expect farmers to absorb the price increases, and, indeed, too often supermarkets push for a price decrease, which means they will not buy locally. Farmers in my area tell me that the supermarkets will say, “Here is the price for this week,” even though it costs the farmer more to produce their quality product. There has to be a role for the adjudicator. My firm belief is that, had the meat been locally sourced, there would not have been an issue. I support those who call for an investigation into the way labels are written and for all things to be made clear, which is what the hon. Member for Croydon North proposes.

Have we learned a lesson? I hope we have, and I hope we can improve. The major supermarkets are saying that they have learned a lesson, and I hope they have; consumers are saying that they have also learned a lesson, and I hope they have, too. They are both committed to the product. Our job is to ensure that the lesson learned translates into action so that we do not find ourselves in the same position in five years’ time. The next time someone has a burger containing horsemeat, it should be because they are aware of what they are eating, not because they went to the local supermarket and chose a cheaper brand.