Elliott Review and Food Crime

Guy Opperman Excerpts

Wednesday 2nd April 2014 Westminster Hall

[Laura Sandys (South Thanet) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dr McCrea, and it is also a great pleasure to see the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth (George Eustice), whom I have not been in a debate with since his elevation to Minister with responsibility for food.

It was a great shock to the British people in 2013 to find that our food system could be so badly infiltrated by crime. It started to corrupt our food system, and horsemeat was introduced into our meat products. That was shocking, because food is not just any consumer product; the public need to trust food. We need to ensure the highest standards to secure long-term stability in the food sector as a whole. The scandal changed food habits. Immediately afterwards, £300 million was knocked off Tesco’s share price. Long supply chains are now seen as serious liabilities. I hope that the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs sees the need for a much more systematic assessment and analysis of the food sector—not just the production side, but all its segments. We could have anticipated some of the problems that we faced in the horsemeat scandal, because certain conditions were present.

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. I also congratulate the team behind the Elliott review, which made helpful and important recommendations. On Tesco’s share price going down, she will be aware that local markets and butchers enjoyed a renaissance, as people—certainly in my area of Northumberland—realised that the safest, most secure and best place to buy meat was the local butcher, not the supermarket.

[Laura Sandys]

Absolutely. In many ways, the scandal rejuvenated the way we used to buy food in the high street from local suppliers. To be frank, while one trusts one’s local butcher, this systemic problem will face everyone in the food retailing sector if we do not start to recognise that certain characteristics are creating certain underlying problems. Food crime has risen across Europe, and we have to ensure that we protect smaller retailers from infiltration by food crime, which can come through any weak link in the system.

I come back to anticipating and predicting problems in the food system. Since 2008, there has been a 30% increase in the cost of base commodities. Over that period, one would expect some early warning signs. We may not have expected crime, but we had to expect that something would give, because food prices in shops did not rise to the same extent as commodity prices. Given that 30% increase in commodity prices, anyone looking at the marketing of food would say that profits would have to fall, prices would have to increase, or the products would have to adapt. How is a supermarket frozen cottage pie that was £1 five years ago still £1 today, after a 30% increase in base commodity prices? What is in it is probably not illegal, but it is certainly not very desirable, and there is no flash across the packaging saying that there is 30% less meat in it. That disconnect between price rises and supermarket retail prices should have created some sort of early warning signal within Government.

[Guy Opperman]

To take the cottage pie example, should not the message from this debate, aside from all the points about the Elliott review and security, be that we should encourage cooking in our schools, and encourage people to buy the meat from the butcher and the potato from a grocer, so that they can create a wonderful cottage pie themselves, rather than buying it in Tesco or other supermarkets? That must be the message.

[Laura Sandys]

Yes. It is an incredibly important message, and I am happy to accept any invitation to have a cottage pie cooked by my hon. Friend.