Elliott Review and Food Crime

Gregory Campbell Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2014 Westminster Hall

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr McCrea. I congratulate the hon. Member for South Thanet (Laura Sandys) on securing this important debate. She has been interested in the topic for some time and we have both taken part in several debates on it.

I want to add my voice to those who have welcomed Professor Elliott’s interim report on the integrity of food supply networks and his recommendations for stemming the growing tide of food crime. As we have heard, criminal networks increasingly see the potential for what Professor Elliott describes as

“huge profits and low risks”

in the food industry. The hon. Lady said that it was now more profitable and considerably less risky to be involved in food fraud than in the drugs trade. The National Audit Office reports that cases of food fraud reported by local authorities have increased by two thirds since 2010. Results published by a number of local authorities, including West Yorkshire, Leicester and West Sussex, from a survey of meat products on sale in their areas, show that gross contamination of meat is widespread. Leicester trading standards, for example, found that half of the meat products it sampled contained species of animals not identified on the label, which is in breach of legal requirements for composition and labelling. Some of it was probably deliberate fraud and some was probably cross-contamination due to poor hygiene, but it is an obvious matter of concern.

Huw Watkins, who heads the intelligence hub at the Intellectual Property Office, has documented shocking cases of adulterated goods seized in the UK in recent months, ranging from a 40-foot lorry containing over 17,000 litres of fake vodka to cases of goat’s milk adulterated with cow’s milk, which could be fatal to allergy sufferers. I was struck by Professor Elliott’s account of a meat product supplier, who had been asked by a retailer to produce a gourmet burger for a unit price of under 30p. Even using the cheapest available beef from older cows, the lowest possible unit price for the burger that the supplier could produce was 59p. Professor Elliott concluded that the only way to meet the demands of the retailer would be to switch to beef supplied from premises that were not EU approved. That black-market meat would then be ground with cheap offal, such as heart and brain, and the incorporation of meat emulsion, also known as pink slime or soylent pink, and mechanically separated or recovered meat. The product would then have been marketed as a gourmet burger, targeting the top end of the market at a higher price and at a huge profit margin for the retailer, which would be committing fraud by misrepresentation.

The example highlights a culture that Professor Elliott describes as one of casual dishonesty, which he says needs to change to one where food composition is proved, not assumed. He recommends that if retailers consistently buy below the market price, they should check there are no grounds to suspect the goods are criminal property or they risk being guilty of complicity in a crime. In other words, they should know that if they are getting something that seems too good to be true, it is too good to be true and something dodgy is going on.

In the rest of the time available, I want to concentrate on a few concerns. Answers to written parliamentary questions that I have recently tabled reveal an alarming drop in food testing over the past five years. Food composition testing is down 48%; food labelling and presentation testing is down 53.4%; microbiological analyses are down by 25.3%; and food contamination analyses are down by 24.5%. Professor Elliott has warned that cuts to food testing and inspection could put lives at risk. He has said that they could compromise the safety of the food that people eat to such an extent that “people start to die” and has called for “strong” and “well resourced” regulators.

Andy Foster, from the Trading Standards Institute, told a recent “Dispatches” programme on Channel 4:

“You take money out of sampling, you take money out of inspection, you take the money out of the consumer protection system. You will get increased levels of fraudulent activity…When you have some local authorities—like some in London—operating on one trading standards officer, how on earth can they possibly deal with all their demands from fraudulent activity?”

Cuts to trading standards are expected to result in a fall in the number of officers to below 2,000, compared with 3,000 in 2009, while the number of public analyst labs, where food is tested, has dropped from 15 to 11 in the past three years.

In February, when I asked the Minister at Environment, Food and Rural Affairs questions about the shocking West Yorkshire test results, which showed that more than a third of food samples were not what they claimed to be or had been mislabelled in some way, he replied that the 30% figure was

“misleading, because the samples looked at were based on intelligence and from areas where there was greater concern in the first place.”—[Official Report, 13 February 2014; Vol. 575, c. 1004.]

I appreciate that that is a factor; it was a risk-based assessment, so areas of concern were being targeted. However, West Yorkshire’s public analyst, Dr Duncan Campbell, believes the authority’s results represent what is going on nationally. Felicity Lawrence of The Guardian, which covered the results of the survey, concluded:

“Because it was looking, West Yorkshire found problems”.

It is clear that routine sampling, as well as that based on intelligence, is vital if cheats are to be caught and food safety standards maintained. Dr Duncan Campbell explains that well:

“Go into a pub and the bottle optics behind the bar will be filled with leading brands of vodka or whisky. If trading standards never check they are what they claim to be, and the publican is having his margins squeezed, there is a huge incentive for him to refill his bottles with cheaper generic spirits from the cash and carry.

That principle holds true across the whole retail and manufacturing sector. If you don’t have routine sampling in each area, you don’t find the cheats, and there is no deterrent to protect the public.”

[Mr Gregory Campbell (East Londonderry) (DUP)]

Does the hon. Lady agree that with the fall in the amount of testing and sampling, and price increases affecting both production and the retail margin, 12 months from now things are likely to be worse, not better, unless the trend is reversed?

[Kerry McCarthy]

Yes. There is a double incentive. One is that people are perhaps more likely to do things that they think they can get away with. The other is that profits are being squeezed and there are limits on the price that people can charge for products and still manage to sell them. That is entirely true.

In his interim report, Professor Elliott called for both risk-based and random testing to protect the consumer. Will the Minister make that FSA policy? The enforcement of standards has become increasingly random as council budgets are slashed. In answers that I have received from the Under-Secretary of State for Health, the hon. Member for Battersea (Jane Ellison),about funding for food testing, the Government have insisted they have increased funding through the provision of additional funding from the FSA to local authorities. That has increased to £2.2 million for 2013-14 from £900,000 in 2010-11. That is welcome, but it does not compensate for severe cuts to local authority budgets, which have resulted, for example, in 743 job losses in trading standards at council level between 2009 and 2012. Leicester city council’s head of regulation, Roman Leszczyszyn, said that trading standards officers had been encouraged by central Government to pursue intelligence-led enforcement, rather than random sampling, to

“reduce the burden on business and remove unnecessary inspection”.

I am deeply concerned that the Government’s ideological commitment to deregulation is trumping their responsibility for food safety. As the Elliott review says, consumers should be put first—something that does not seem to be happening under the present Government.

Last week, I raised with the Minister Professor Elliott’s concerns about the potential for budget cuts to affect the integrity of our supply chains, but he replied as if my question was solely about the horsemeat scandal of last year. However, as today’s debate has highlighted, we have moved on from the fraudulent use of horsemeat in beef products to the much wider investigation of food crime and our complex food supply networks. Would the Minister like to have another go at answering my question of 27 March: does he agree with Professor Elliott that budget cutting could reach the point where the safety of the food we eat is compromised to the extent that “people start to die”, or is the Professor just overreacting?

I know that the hon. Member for South Thanet is passionate about the cause of ensuring that people eat better food and do not resort to cheap food. It is a difficult issue. People’s budgets are under pressure. It is one thing to educate them about what is in their food, and to make sure that marketing of food reflects what is in it, and that it is of good quality. However, the cost of living is still an issue. My right hon. Friend the Member for Birkenhead (Mr Field), who is no longer in his place, is mounting an inquiry into the question of how to square people’s inability to afford to pay a great deal for food with the fact that we should not be encouraging them to buy cheap food. That is quite a job. The important point is that no matter how much people pay for their food, they have a right to know what is in it. They should not be given food that is not what they think it is.