Food Contamination

Huw Irranca-Davies Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Miss McIntosh]

Perhaps I could set the scene in terms of the food industry. As of last year, there were more than 490,000 food businesses in England. In 2011-12, spending to protect consumers from food incidents was £241 million, 75% of which was spent by local authorities to enforce food law.

One issue the Committee identified was that the Food Standards Agency reports to three key Departments with responsibility for aspects of food policy. Furthermore, there has been a marked fall since 2009-12 in the number of local authority food samples tested. In addition, there are 12 different national and European databases on food intelligence.

Let me record a little of the history. In November 2012, there was a routine meeting between the Food Safety Authority of Ireland and the UK’s FSA. At that meeting, the Irish FSA mentioned that it was developing a new methodology for checking the composition of meat products. The first question the Committee asked—we are asking it again today—was why it took two months for our own FSA to authorise and conduct any testing.

Tests then found that there had been contamination; it was small in the UK, but it was widespread in the EU. In the UK, horse and pig DNA were found in a variety of beef products, including samples of Findus lasagne, which contained more than 60% horsemeat; Aldi lasagne and spaghetti bolognese, which contained between 30% and 100% horsemeat; and beef products certified as halal and supplied to prisons in England and Wales that contained pork DNA.

Those findings emerged only after extensive testing of beef products across the EU and by local authorities and industry in the UK. The EU tests revealed that 4.66% of products contained more than 1% horse DNA. The UK incidence of contamination in products tested was less than 1%. Although the contamination was small, and the principle was that this was a labelling and a fraud issue, there could so easily have been a food safety scare and a food safety scandal.

Complacency is not the best word to use, but we have seen no sense of urgency among the Government, which is why we welcome my hon. Friend’s appointment as Minister. The Secretary of State or another Minister told us in evidence that the perpetrators of this crime—if it was a crime, and everyone generally understands it is a crime—would face the full force of the law. What arrests have therefore been made? What is the role of Europol and, possibly, Interpol? What charges and prosecutions have been brought by the City of London police to draw a line under this issue?

If we are to boost consumer confidence, which I think we all want to do, we must show there is no further contamination and no prospect of further contamination. We therefore need to know at what stage the contamination and adulteration entered the food supply chain. We talk a lot in the two reports about controls in the food chain, to protect consumers from contaminated and potentially unsafe food, which did not work in the case in question.

Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the matter, as something following on from the BSE crisis, is that every 10 years we have either a food scare or a food crisis. In the early 1990s, it was BSE; in 2001, it was foot and mouth disease; and in 2012—we know that it started in 2011—it was the scandal to do with horsemeat contamination and pork DNA being found in halal meat. That was completely unacceptable.

One worry is identifying the supply chain, and traceability, and we drew some clear conclusions from the evidence. The chief executive of the FSA told us the contamination and adulteration could have been going on for almost a year, from March 2012, when desinewed meat production in this country was banned—there was also a so-called ban in the EU, although we believe it was being produced in the EU.

We concluded that the system for food traceability, including the requirement that at every stage in the supply chain operators must keep records of the source and destination of each product, has been breached; that retailers and meat processors should have been more vigilant about the risk of deliberate adulteration; and that trust is not a sufficient guarantee in a system where meat is traded many times before reaching its final destination. We have also noted our concern about the length of supply chains for processed and frozen beef products. We welcome the efforts of some retailers to shorten those whenever possible.

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

I commend the hon. Lady for securing the debate. Perhaps I can bring together two strands of her thinking. There will be public discontent if only a relatively few small players are investigated and prosecuted and become scapegoats for the industry. If larger players—whether they are meat processors, retailers or others—can be proved not to have used due diligence, or to have been negligent, ignorant or downright culpable, the size of the operation or its importance to the European market should not preclude investigation, including by Governments working together, if necessary.

[Miss McIntosh]

I welcome that intervention. The hon. Gentleman’s Front-Bench colleague, the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner), led a line of questioning in that regard, and we met a brick wall. I agree that the action taken should not be symbolic, against small retailers. We must go through the supply chain. When a major supermarket takes a supply chain on trust year after year, without inspecting identities and its integrity, there is definitely something wrong. As to traceability and the so-called labelling issue, I confess to being disappointed with the Government response. We have identified a problem of traceability and labelling, and I urge the Minister to go a bit further, so that we have concrete suggestions.

I have mentioned the number of relevant businesses and the food industry’s importance to the economy. We must accept, with respect to testing, the need for a risk-based assessment, but when we are told that there is a risk in a particular country we need, for goodness’ sake, to wake up, liven up and respond, because of the potential for a problem in this country.

The people we need to go out and do testing—the first in line—are food analysts. We learned in evidence that most of those are in the Association of Public Analysts. I want to dwell on that point for a moment. We found out that insufficient testing has been done by local authorities since 2009. We need to accept that, although testing must be risk-based, there should be some random testing to ensure that nothing slips through the net.

We also identified an acute potential shortage of public analysts. I want to take issue with the Government response to our second report at point 13:

“Officials from both FSA and Defra meet regularly with representatives from the Association of Public Analysts and local authorities to ensure sufficient laboratory capacity exists and suitable methods are in place”.

I want to quiz the Minister on that. The Association of Public Analysts has meetings with FSA officials twice a year. That is not “regularly”—it is only every six months. One meeting was attended by a DEFRA official, the implication being that the other was not, and laboratory capacity is not discussed. Even if it were discussed, it is not within the gift of individual public analysts, or the association, to prevent laboratory closures or to ensure sufficient capacity.

The Government response is flawed because it does not deal with the Committee recommendation that they should ensure that there are sufficient properly trained public analysts. Why does that matter? It is not only the Committee, which heard powerful and compelling evidence about it, that concluded that it is important. The National Audit Office report, published earlier this month, leant heavily on—I would like to think—our work and on the report’s conclusions and recommendations. It stressed, as we did, that budget cuts coupled with a two thirds rise in reported food fraud have increased the risk of another horsemeat scandal. The NAO also said that the cuts in testing led to a loss of intelligence information, so that the Government

“failed to identify the potential risk of adulteration of beef with horsemeat, despite indications of heightened risk.”

The NAO report questions whether there will be sufficient capacity to respond to future incidents. I am mindful of what the previous Secretary of State, my right hon. Friend the Member for Meriden (Mrs Spelman), said about DEFRA being the fourth emergency service, and of the possibility that, given the dramatic decline over recent years in the number of public analysts and laboratories, there will not be the capability for detecting food fraud. I urge the Minister to respond to that concern.

I have covered the question of Europol, Interpol and our police bringing people to book, and discussed traceability. I want to make a final point. There is a richesse before us, and I could dwell on every recommendation and conclusion; I am sure that the Minister will remember the passion with which the Committee adopted the recommendations. I want now to focus on what the FSA’s role should be.

In our first report, we conclude:

“Whilst Ministers are properly responsible for policy, the FSA’s diminished role has led to a lack of clarity about where responsibility lies, and this has weakened the UK’s ability to identify and respond to food standards concerns.”

We found that the FSA and Government reacted in a “flat-footed” way and were

“unable to respond effectively within structures designed primarily to respond to threats to human health.”

We did not much care for the Government response, but I am sure that the Minister will try to justify the rather disappointing response that the

“Machinery of Government changes in 2010 led to some changes”.

The response went on to tell us what they were.

In our more recent report, to which we have only recently received the Government response, we reiterate our previous conclusion and confirm that we need greater clarity about the role of the FSA in major incidents. The point is that we accept that this is primarily a food-labelling issue, but there is the suggestion of fraud, to which the hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) referred, on a massive scale, and we need the reassurance that the FSA is, in my words, fit for purpose. However, the Government response does not fit the bill.

We are told:

“The Government is concerned that the Committee may have misunderstood”—

I say to the Minister that that is a very dangerous allegation to make—

“the status and constitution of the FSA.”

We know, as the response states, that the FSA,

“as a non-Ministerial government department, does not report to any other department. The FSA is accountable to Parliament and reports…through Health Ministers.”

The National Audit Office confirms our initial conclusion that the problem is that the FSA reports to three different Departments. That is a source of concern. It is compounded by the fact that we are having review after review after review. We came to conclusions quite early on—in March, I think—about our fundamental concerns. We are now hurrying towards the end of the year. We have the benefit of Professor Pat Troop’s response to the incident. Her conclusions back up entirely what we say.

The question for the Minister is why the Government are not responding to our conclusions, to the review by Professor Troop and to the National Audit Office findings, but have called for another review. This is something that we used to say in opposition; it is not unfamiliar to me. Under the last Administration, as I am sure the hon. Member for Ogmore will remember, if there was a problem, we would have a review, then another review and then another review. Now, we need to see some action, so the fact that the Elliott review has been set up, will make an interim conclusion and will report finally only in the spring of next year is very disappointing and missing the point.

I would like to draw the strands together and confirm that this is not the time for another review. We need a fundamental rethink on the infrastructure, composition and role of the Food Standards Agency, what its relationships with the Departments are and who goes out and gives explanations to the public and to the industry in the event of an incident.

We need to see some movement on reducing the likelihood of future contamination by improving the traceability provisions and ensuring the integrity of each supply chain. It is very pleasing that in local butchers’ shops in my constituency and, I understand, across the country and in farm shops and at farmers’ markets, the purchasing of food has gone up incrementally. Everyone is buying local, because they know what they are buying. They know that it is beef or whatever the label says. As I said, that is very pleasing, but we need to restore public confidence in what is a multi-million-pound industry through supermarkets. We also need to look at the vexatious issue of there being a shortage of analysts and insufficient testing to put the consumer mind at rest.

I commend our two reports to the House. I have dwelt on three issues, but I would like to bring to the attention of the Minister and the shadow Minister our main concerns, which are set out in all our recommendations. Those have been supported by Professor Pat Troop’s review. She does not disagree with them one iota. We have also had the very powerful—it uses very strong language—report from the National Audit Office on “Food safety and authenticity in the processed meat supply chain”. I therefore now say to the Minister that this is a call for action, rather than for another review.

[Roger Williams (Brecon and Radnorshire) (LD)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Osborne, at this late hour on a Thursday afternoon. I should begin by declaring an interest. I am still involved in a farming business that produces red meat: beef and lamb. I commend the Chairman of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), and the members of the Committee for the work that they have done on this very important matter. I also commend the NAO report that has recently been published.

The sound and fury has gone out of this matter for now, but that does not mean that it is not extraordinarily important. It is extraordinarily important for our farming communities that their product should not be contaminated again in the future and extraordinarily important for consumers that they should have the ability to choose what they want to eat, knowing that it is as described on the label. Sadly, however, the history of food is full of examples of contamination and adulteration. The watering down of beer is a heinous crime, but it has been perpetrated everywhere. It is not the only one, unfortunately.

I would like to draw a distinction between contamination and adulteration. As far as I am concerned, contamination is when a small quantity of extraneous material finds its ways into foodstuffs. That usually occurs because of negligence or carelessness in the preparation or processing of food, in relation either to buildings or to equipment. Sometimes contamination may not be serious. It may involve inert material. But sometimes, of course, it can be very serious indeed. One example is the poisonous material ergot in rye bread; I can think of other examples. It is also very serious when infective material gets into foodstuffs. Sadly, there are outbreaks of E. coli from time to time in this country. Of course, the Chairman of the Select Committee mentioned the presence of pork in food that is supposed to have been processed to an halal standard, which is grossly offensive to the Muslim community. That is particularly serious as well.

I define contamination as something that does not take place deliberately, but it quickly became apparent to me during the so-called horsemeat scandal that what was happening was not happening through carelessness. In the main, it was a deliberate attempt to make money out of fraud, and we should see it in that light. People from time to time do see the opportunity to do that. If they can introduce something into a foodstuff that does not necessarily alter its appearance, taste or consistency, they can get away with it for a short time before more sophisticated tests can be done on that foodstuff. The Chairman of the Committee mentioned the changes in the way in which certain foodstuffs, including meat, could be included in other foodstuffs.

Adulteration also occurs when we have high commodity prices for meat or for any foodstuff, and of course the price of meat has risen quite considerably. If it rises quickly, there are opportunities for the less scrupulous to introduce a cheaper product into what is a fairly expensive product. My criticism of the supermarket and meat processors still stands: rather than accepting that the price of the commodity had gone up, they were scouring the European markets and probably the world markets to find a cheaper product. That gave an opportunity for less scrupulous people to get involved and make money.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

The hon. Gentleman makes a good contribution. He has a great background in this area. Does he agree that a signal change of the past few decades has made good governance necessary, as the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton said? Whereas a previous outbreak to do with either food providence or safety may have been relatively isolated in a region—I have had them in my area—nowadays the potential danger and risk are much greater, because they are transnational and affect the plates of far more consumers, potentially in many different countries? That is why governance is important.

[Roger Williams]

I agree. My hon. Friend—he is a Welsh MP with me, so I will call him that—reiterates the words of the Chair of the Select Committee. That was a conclusion the Committee came to.

I was going to say that part of the complexity with the process was that the contamination was not happening in only Britain or one region of Britain. Very long and complex food chains were undoubtedly involved, and part of the problem is that we do not know where some of the products originated. For me, one of the key things to come out of the NAO report is on page 5:

“Six months on, inquiries are still ongoing and the original source of the adulteration has not been identified.”

It goes on to say that some people have been arrested. For all that our Government have done and for all that Governments on the continent have done, we still do not know where the horsemeat entered the food chain. Until we can establish that, we will not have done a good job and we will not have deterred other people from trying to make opportunistic profits.

If we do not know where the meat came into the food chain, we have no idea what its provenance was. We do not know whether the animal was slaughtered in a registered slaughterhouse or the back shed of a farm somewhere. We have no idea about the safety of the meat. It appears to many of us that the crisis did not involve any human illness, but if we do not know the provenance of the meat, we do not know if that was by luck alone. It is key that we continue our work and work with our European partners on a governmental as well as a police level to identify where the horsemeat entered the food chain.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

What are the hon. Gentleman’s views on the need for deep intelligence across Departments in analysing what is going on? There could have been a moment when the contamination could have been picked up. It is all very well saying that in hindsight, but it could have been detected. We had massive shipments of horses from Ireland and Northern Ireland into Britain for transport out of the UK, but they were not transported. They were disappearing. There were numbers in, but no numbers out. At some point, a good intelligence operation would have spotted that and flagged up the fact that those horses were going somewhere.

--- Later in debate ---

[Neil Parish (Tiverton and Honiton) (Con)]

It is good to serve under your chairmanship, Mrs Osborne. I welcome the new Minister to his place; we worked well together on the Select Committee and I look forward to him having views entirely consistent with those he had in Committee now he is a Minister. I am partly teasing him, but I look forward to working with him. I enjoyed his friendship on the Committee. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), the Chair of the Select Committee, on securing the debate, because it is necessary for us not to forget exactly what happened.

I want to concentrate on the consequences and on the many lessons that we need to learn. For many years, I have been saying that we have not had proper labelling of the origins of processed food, especially meat products, and the contamination has highlighted that hugely. Basically, the product was travelling all across Europe from the Republic of Ireland, Poland and Romania into Luxembourg and France—it was travelling all over the place. The trail—exporting from one country and importing to another—was almost impossible to follow.

As the hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams) highlighted, the value of the processed meat is key. If someone bought a joint of beef and a joint of horse—we cannot do that in this country, but in many European countries they can—they would immediately be able to tell the difference. If we minced them up and put them in a burger, however, I suspect that when we actually looked at it physically, we would not see a great deal of difference. If horse meat is trading at a quarter to a third of the price of beef, it is tempting to the unscrupulous in the food processing industry to substitute one for the other.

Not only the Government but the large retailers should keep a check on the situation. If retailers are buying beef burgers for less than the cost of the beef that should be in them, they should ask how on earth a company can produce that product for that price. That is a lesson for the industry and the big retailers to learn. The hon. Member for Brecon and Radnorshire probably shares my view that although the big retailers are necessary, they have used their muscle over the years to drive down prices for primary producers and farmers. They have spent their lives doing it. This time they drove the price down too far, and people came in who said, “Okay, these big retailers want cheap burgers; well, we’ll mix in a bit of horse meat, and it’ll be fine.” That is where questions need to be asked.

My hon. Friend the Member for Thirsk and Malton made the case that the Government need enough public analysts, but retailers also need to employ such people or franchise out the work to somebody else. When I go into a large supermarket, I expect to buy a product that is made of what it says on the label. That is the retailer’s responsibility; the Minister may well make that point later. Yes, it is the Government’s responsibility, but it is also very much the responsibility of the retailer.

I noticed that the Chair made a bit of a face when I said that one could tell the difference between a joint of horse meat and a joint of beef. Ethically, we in this country do not eat horse meat, but it is eaten in many countries across Europe, and it is legal. It is necessary to be able to slaughter horses for meat. There are so many horses in this country, some with huge welfare problems, that if we could not slaughter them, the welfare problems would be even larger. I would much rather those horses be slaughtered humanely in this country than taken on vast journeys across the continent in poor conditions to be slaughtered. We must remember that slaughtering and trading horse meat are not crimes in themselves.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

The hon. Gentleman is making a good and cogent point. We must guard not only against inhumane transport but against the possibility that imports of horse meat from places that previously discarded the slaughter of horses, such as the United States—they are now slaughtered in other countries instead—might find their way back to us through Poland or the Czech Republic, with added ingredients such as phenylbutazone, known as bute.

[Neil Parish]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. It leads me neatly on to the fact that, as I said, horse meat must be traceable. It is not only a case of what is imported into this country. In America, there are many racehorses and other sorts of horse that are more likely to have been treated with all sorts of drugs throughout their lives. We must be careful of that.

We in this country must also be careful to ensure that we know where the horses that we slaughter have come from. At the moment, under the passport system, many horses have one, two or several passports, one of which is clean and says that the horse has not been injected with anything, and another one of which may have been used when the horse has been injected with various drugs throughout its life. We need a better passport system and a central database, so that we know where horses come from, to ensure that when they are slaughtered, we know that they are healthy. Although we may not eat the meat, it will be exported for someone else to eat. It is essential.

I believe that some good things will come out of this situation. As other Members have said, it would have been terrible if the contamination had led to a public health issue, but fortunately it did not. One or two horses slaughtered were found to have levels of phenylbutazone, but not enough to hurt anybody eating the meat. We must learn to ensure that horse meat is traceable in future, not because it should be mixed with beef and sold fraudulently but because the meat should be safe.

The other great lesson to be learned concerns the traceability of our own meat. People like farm-assured schemes, such as the red tractor promoted by the National Farmers Union and many others. As soon as horsegate—the problem with horse meat in beef burgers—occurred, people wanted meat from this country. I do not wish to be churlish, but Tesco did not decide to source all its meat from the British Isles out of the goodness of its heart; it decided that that was a good way to make consumers buy at Tesco.

--- Later in debate ---

[Huw Irranca-Davies (Ogmore) (Lab)]

It is a delight to be here, as always. I congratulate the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) and all her Committee members on securing this debate and on the sterling work that they have put in throughout this year. As a critical friend of the industry and of Government, they have scrutinised the causes and effects of and response to the food contamination scandal in a frank and honest way.

It is a great pleasure to follow the contributions from the hon. Members for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams) and for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish). They have great experience in terms of their personal backgrounds and in terms of Select Committees. The hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton made the point that we got away with it. That is the point that we want to focus on. It is not adequate to say that we got away with it. We need to ensure that, within the realms of all the identifiable risks that we can think of, we do not simply get away with it again. We need to put the right things in place to avoid it happening again. As has rightly been pointed out, fortunately there was not a major public safety scare, although there could have been. This was an issue of provenance. We need a fleet-footed response from all the agencies and Government and everybody else.

I also welcome to his new position as Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for Camborne and Redruth—

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dan Rogerson)]

indicated dissent.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

My apologies. I was expecting to see the other new Minister. I welcome the Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the hon. Member for North Cornwall (Dan Rogerson). It is a great position and a great Department. I am sure he will do a wonderful job. I am beginning to think that DEFRA Ministers have taken against me as they keep disappearing in front of me. His previous role as a member of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee stands him in good stead. As I draw on evidence and recommendations from the Committee’s two reports, I am conscious that he is a collective author of those words, findings and recommendations.

[Dan Rogerson]

One of the reports.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

The Minister is a collective author of one of the reports, and there is no way in which he would seek, for whatever reason—under pressure from officials or his Secretary of State, or the lure of the red box or the trappings of a Minister—to resile from the positions that he laid out so very recently. He is a good and honourable man and will stand by his words.

This is a timely debate to look back at the lessons learnt to try to avoid repeating the same mistakes and to return confidence to an industry that was shaken badly. To put it bluntly, consumers were tricked, deceived and defrauded by criminals operating within or alongside the food chain. It is the same food supply chain that we trust to supply safe, nutritious, affordable food and drink to our household tables, our schools and hospitals, and our care homes and cafeterias. That supply chain betrayed us—nothing less. It would be wrong, particularly while criminal investigations are ongoing, to delve too deeply into specific companies and individuals. I think the public and consumer organisations will be rightly outraged if the criminals who infiltrated the supply chain are not brought to book. If complicity or duplicity is identified within the supply chain itself, those companies and individuals should also be brought to book.

[Miss McIntosh]

It would be interesting to know what the hon. Gentleman’s potential future Administration would do to check the integrity of the supply chain. I am mindful of the fact that it was a Labour Government who set up the Food Standards Agency, and one of the difficulties that I highlighted is that it reports to at least two, potentially three, Departments. I take the hon. Gentleman’s point about the retailers, but we rely hugely on the work of the FSA to test the supply chain.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I welcome the hon. Lady’s intervention and the focus that she and the Select Committee have put on not only the FSA, but the overall issue of food governance and the integrity and coherence of it. We have repeatedly made it clear from the early days when its responsibilities were split up that we had concerns about what might happen. Her Committee’s report and the report of the National Audit Office have made it clear that those concerns did not cause the crisis, but contributed to a delayed reaction, which I will come to in a moment. There is confusion at national, local and intergovernmental level. I shall not call for a review today. I shall echo her call for action and for the Government to introduce proposals to change the structure of food governance.

Tesco, the UK’s market-leading supermarket, notably and admirably fessed up to its responsibilities. It said, “We get it.” It took out full-page advertisements coinciding—coincidentally, I am sure—with the NFU conference in February, and it is seeking to re-engineer its supply chains and get closer to primary producers. It has a way to go, as has already been mentioned. I visited Tesco’s headquarters and we went through this in detail. Although it has a journey to make, I do not doubt its sincerity and ambition to do so. It is consumer-focused; there is a reason why it is doing this. Other large retailers have already developed shorter supply chains or other methods of ensuring the provenance of their food.

In the early stages, many took a different approach and frankly said, “Not us, guvnor.” They pointed to abroad or to smaller suppliers, international criminals, other third parties and, frankly, anybody but themselves. It is clear that the criminal activities of some have damaged public confidence in the whole supply chain. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee spoke for many in the country, when it reported that it could only

“conclude that British consumers have been cynically and systematically duped in pursuit of profit by elements within the food industry.”

Whether that was criminality, negligence, complicity or failure of due diligence through the whole supply chain, from major processors and supermarkets down to the very small players, all were to varying degrees at fault in causing the failures, and all have responsibility in rectifying them and restoring trust and confidence.

I welcome the letter that I received yesterday from ABP, a dominant player in the UK and European beef processing market, which tells me that it supplies more than 20 countries and has a network of over 15,000 farmers. In the letter, the company acknowledges—it cannot deny—the presence of horsemeat in some of its frozen beef products over the past year, but states:

“It was certainly not an activity sanctioned by ABP in any way at any level”.

It goes on to make it clear that the company is not subject to any ongoing investigations.

In some ways, it is unfair to pick out ABP, because it was not alone in a complex and vulnerable supply chain that put beef adulterated with horsemeat and, for good measure, with trace elements—thank goodness, only trace elements—of phenylbutazone or bute into our homes, hospitals, schools and canteens, as well as, through food distribution companies, into Royal Ascot and the royal household. When it comes to food adulteration, we are genuinely—and right royally—all in it together.

As the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton said, those who came out well from the crisis were the butchers, local abattoirs, and those in local food networks and short supply chains, whose customers could prove where their food came from and what it was. The upside of the crisis is that it has reignited a major debate about our relationship with the food we eat, which I hope will lead to changes in how we produce and value our food.

Much of the modern supply chain is long, complex and international, with multiple handling and processing operations and multiple opportunities for adulteration. The lesson for those in wider supply chains, especially the major and dominant supermarkets, processors and distributors, is that no one can escape responsibility for the mess we got ourselves into or avoid responsibility for restoring trust in those supply chains. It is not good enough to say, “It wasn’t us, guvnor,” because as far as the consumer is concerned, it was.

I want to turn to the issues of food governance identified by the Select Committee’s two reports and highlighted in a timely report by the National Audit Office, on 10 October, entitled, “Food safety and authenticity in the processed meat supply chain”.

I tell the Minister that the Government must clearly now take responsibility: they are also in the dock and must fess up. They must answer criticisms of their role in failing to ensure effective governance of the food manufacturing sector. Although I commend the industry for working alongside UK, Irish and EU agencies to strengthen the testing and tracking of food products in response to the horsemeat crisis, I cannot yet commend the UK Government, whose response to the crisis was hampered by structural problems of their own making. The Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, of which the Minister was a member, put that succinctly in its first report, stating that

“the current contamination crisis has caught the FSA and Government flat-footed and unable to respond effectively within structures designed primarily to respond to threats to human health.”

The National Audit Office’s No. 1 key finding was:

“A split since 2010 in the responsibilities for food policy in England has led to confusion among stakeholders and no obvious benefit to those implementing controls.”

That split in responsibilities is, of course, the one that was devised and implemented in 2010 not by the Minister, who is only just in post, but by his coalition Government. They are the architect of their own misfortune, but more importantly, of what others have described as the flat-footed response to the food adulteration scandal. The food sector and the consumer deserve better. It is not the fault of the FSA, but of the Government who split its responsibilities.

[Neil Parish]

I accept, to some degree, the hon. Gentleman’s assertions about changes to the FSA, but there had been no testing of horsemeat for 10 years or more, and the situation arose only when we started testing horsemeat. What matters is not the structure, but the fact that we were just not testing. All through his watch and that of his Government, nobody was testing horsemeat. That is why I think that he is being a little disingenuous, if I may say so.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I utterly refute the idea of my being disingenuous, because I am citing the words, evidence and recommendations of the Select Committee and National Audit Office reports. The criticisms are not mine, although I entirely agree with them, because we said the same from the outset, after the FSA was split up. I am not being disingenuous, but frank: I am saying what I have consistently said month after month, and year after year, and that is what our position has been.

I understand what the hon. Gentleman says, but I am hammering the Government because governance is central to how we resolve the situation. We can ask the industry to do many things—we have done so, and the industry is getting on with them—and agencies are helping it, but unless we resolve the fundamental issue of how to bring together the entirety of the food industry coherently and not split it between Departments, we will be back here again. That is what his Committee concluded.

The Government response to the concerns is worryingly complacent. The document states, on page 7:

“The Government is concerned that the Committee may have misunderstood the status and constitution of the FSA”,

and it then defends the FSA in the following three paragraphs. If the Select Committee has misunderstood the FSA, so have the National Audit Office and many other well-informed, critical friends of the food industry who want the Government to look more fundamentally at the FSA and to review the cack-handed way in which its responsibilities were diced and sliced in 2010.

The Government should adopt the Tesco approach: fess up to this aspect of their responsibility, learn the lessons that they must learn and deal properly with the role of the FSA and food governance, instead of tinkering at the edges. It takes a big man or woman to accept that they were wrong, but I hope that the new Minister, in whom I have confidence, will be able to do so.

Let me ask the Minister some questions that stem from the Select Committee and National Audit Office reports. Coming new into the post, does he accept, from what he has looked at, that the Government’s and the FSA’s early response to the crisis was flat-footed and slow, as has been said, partly thanks to the Government’s machinery of government changes? Does he accept that the Government’s decision to split the FSA roles directly led to confusion and a lack of clarity about responsibilities at the outset of the crisis, both between Whitehall Departments and agencies and between local government enforcement and the FSA?

Does the Minister accept that, as highlighted by the National Audit Office, confusion at local and national level still exists today, despite the Government’s well-meaning reforms, which signifies that deeper reforms or the unwinding of some of the 2010 reforms might be needed? Does he accept that, despite strong Government rebuttals back in February and March, the introduction of the banned substance phenylbutazone or bute into the food chain via horsemeat, albeit in trace elements, might have turned the situation from a food provenance issue into a food safety crisis? If he does not accept that, I ask him to read the National Audit Office report.

How does the Minister respond to criticisms that intelligence sharing, especially between food authorities and Departments in Ireland and the UK, has been weakened by the coalition’s machinery of government changes? Does he believe that reducing food testing by local authorities by a quarter, linked to cuts in funding and budgetary stresses, contributed to a lack of deeper intelligence from local sources that might have picked up the risks earlier? To turn to the point made by the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton in his intervention, one of the things that the National Audit Office picked up on was the lack of deep intelligence down on the ground. Although it applauds a risk-based approach, deep intelligence would have flagged up these sorts of incidents at an early stage.

How does the Minister respond to fears that the closure of four public control laboratories in the past three years combined with a reduction in public analysts from 40 to 29 since 2010 raises the potential risk that we will be unable to respond to any future incident of this type?

My final question echoes a concern of the Select Committee and of the wider public. Where are the prosecutions, the fines, the penalties, the custodial sentences, and the naming and shaming of the guilty parties? I realise that the Minister will not be able to go into detail about the ongoing investigations, but we need to know whether we are talking about one or two bad apples or a fundamental problem with a rotten barrel. The Select Committee asks whether this is

“a complex network of traders and processors acting fraudulently to deceive consumers and retailers.”

The longer we wait for conclusions to the investigations, the more the feeling grows that people are escaping justice and that the networks that caused this criminality are also delaying that justice. We cannot expect the Minister to comment in detail on investigations that are under way, but I hope that he can at least inform us of some progress.

At the outset, I reiterated the justified criticism by the Select Committee of the flat-footed response by the FSA and the Government. Its call for stronger powers for the FSA were re-emphasised by the head of the National Audit Office only last week. He stated:

“The January 2013 horsemeat incident has revealed a gap between what citizens expect of the controls over the authenticity of their food, and the effectiveness of those controls on reality. The division of responsibilities for food safety and authenticity has created confusion.”

In conclusion, while Labour rightly demands—I know the Minister will demand this as well—that the food sector step up and take responsibility for its failures and commends the sector for the work it has done so far in recent months, it also demands the same response from our Government. The sins of the father do not have to be visited on the son. The new Under-Secretary of State can acknowledge that the 2010 FSA machinery of government changes were wrong-headed, that they played a contributory factor in retarding the early response to the crisis, that they are a risk factor, as the NAO says, in any future large-scale food adulteration or contamination episodes, and that he should now step up and act for the good of consumers, the food sector and farmers and for his own peace of mind. Last week, the head of the National Audit Office said:

“The Government needs to remove this confusion, and improve its understanding of potential food fraud and how intelligence is brought together and shared.”

I look forward to the Under-Secretary of State doing just that, beginning with his response. I wish him well in taking forward the Government’s action on this matter.

[Sandra Osborne (in the Chair)]

The debate must end by 16.43, and it would be appreciated if the Minister would leave some time at the end for the Chair of the Select Committee to respond.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Dan Rogerson)]

It is a pleasure, Mrs Osborne, to serve under your chairmanship and to stand here as both a Minister and a member of the Select Committee—at least in name, if not in application. The House will remove me from the Committee in due course.

Before I get on to substantive matters, let me say that it has been an absolute pleasure and an honour to serve on that Committee for more than eight years, under the excellent chairmanship of the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) and also of Michael Jack, who did fine work as Chair of the Committee in the previous Parliament. It is also a pleasure to follow all those who spoke in this debate; they spoke with passion and brought insight. I may not agree with all the conclusions that the hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) has drawn, but I pay tribute none the less to his experience and the care that he has taken in preparing for this debate. As he knows, I have family roots in his constituency, so it is always a pleasure to hear from him.

I am grateful to the Chair of the Select Committee and colleagues for securing this debate, so that we can explore this issue in some depth. As highlighted, the incident has been the subject of a number of reviews and reports, which reflects the level of public concern and the fact that it is essential that consumers have confidence in the food that they buy or are served.

Food fraud is completely unacceptable, and that is what we are dealing with here. Consumers have every right to expect food to be correctly described. It is up to the whole food supply chain to ensure that such an incident does not happen again. As the Committee’s report says, industry’s assurance measures and the action that it takes to ensure the traceability of products are key to a sustainable food chain.

As the Committee is aware, the industry is taking its own steps to build consumer confidence. Although the Government should not be closely supervising the industry or limiting its ability to react to market signals, they do have a role in helping to restore consumer confidence and in enforcing EU law.

To help restore consumer confidence, the Government have encouraged industry to continue to give high priority to the testing of processed meat products and the sharing of information. More than 36,000 industry test results have been reported, covering manufacturing, processing, retail, catering and food service, which demonstrates the seriousness with which the industry is taking the need to remain vigilant and to restore consumer confidence in its food.

The Government agree that they have a role in working with businesses from across the food supply chain to identify ways to strengthen the industry and to enable it to respond to the challenges and opportunities that it faces. Regular meetings are being held, chaired by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, to ensure that British food is recognised for its rigorous standards and traceability and that our farmers and producers do not get a bad reputation as a result of incidents such as the one involving horsemeat.

Research shows that in the wake of the horsemeat incident, UK consumers have a greater level of trust in British produce, and the industry must welcome and build on that. That point was made by my hon. Friends the Members for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) and for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams), as well as my hon. Friend the Chair of the Select Committee in her opening remarks.

During the incident, the Government’s role focused on working with industry and local authorities to establish the scale of the problem, investigating and taking enforcement action against those responsible and prompting action at a European level to deal with some issues that have again been raised today. Our focus is now on learning and sharing the lessons from the incident and on improving the current approach to food authenticity and fraud.

The UK Government reacted quickly when they were alerted to the presence of horsemeat in beef products on sale in the UK by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland. That is backed up by the findings of the Troop review, mentioned by the Committee Chairman and others, into the FSA’s response to the incident.

The Committee has questioned whether the FSA should have done something sooner when the Food Safety Authority of Ireland mentioned that it was developing testing methods to detect horsemeat. I would like to clarify that a competent authority in another member state informing the UK that it is planning to develop a detection method is not the same as a member state informing the UK that it has found evidence of contamination or food fraud. We would hope and expect that any intelligence that another member state had would be shared with us at that juncture. Nothing was brought to the Government’s attention at that point; it was only that the FSAI was developing a test.

Just as we have a programme of work to develop testing to support our enforcement of EU food law, other member states develop methods for testing the authenticity of food. In its evidence to the Committee, the FSAI stated that it was “surprised” by the results and retested and reconfirmed the results before informing its Government officials and Ministers.

Once the presence of horsemeat in beef products had been identified as potential fraud, rather than unintended contamination, the UK’s response to the incident was rapid and extensive—more rapid and extensive than that of any other member state. An unprecedented level of testing was carried out quickly by industry and local authorities, the results of which were communicated to consumers and shared with the Commission and other European countries. It is to the credit of the industry and enforcement officers that that activity was carried out at pace and effectively, and to UK laboratories’ credit that they demonstrated the ability to up their capacity to meet demands.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I commend the Minister for making a very good first stab at it; I know that he will be excellent in this role—I genuinely mean that. However, I want to clarify that he is now distancing himself firmly from the recommendations and findings of the Committee and the National Audit Office. He is turning 180°.

[Dan Rogerson]

I am seeking areas of common ground between the two—between the Committee and the NAO. Having had the opportunity to discuss this matter with officials in preparation for this debate, having looked at the report from the Committee of which I was a member, having looked at the other report that the hon. Gentleman mentioned and having sought the evidence, what is clear to me as a Minister is the important distinction between the notification that a test was being developed and the discovery that horsemeat had been found. That is an important distinction.

The Government share the Committee’s desire to see those responsible for the situation brought to justice. I note the Committee’s concerns about the pace of those investigations and the number of arrests. However, it is a criminal matter and so is being dealt with by the prosecuting authorities—not something in which the Government should intervene. However, the police Gold Group, chaired by the City of London police, is taking the matter very seriously and the necessary steps are being taken.

Another point to make is that if we wanted a faster response, we might well have ended up with lesser fines, of the sort that Members have been concerned about today. We would have had a local authority response at a lower level, which would have been swifter but would perhaps not have picked up on the issues. I want to reassure Members present here that these investigations are live, that—as we know—arrests have been made and that these matters are being taken very seriously. However, it would not be proper for me to seek to jump to conclusions ahead of the report on those investigations.

We will continue to share information from the UK with Europol and other enforcing authorities, and we are mindful that a number of businesses in the UK have been victims of this fraud and will also be keen to see action taken against those responsible. People along the chain could be said to have been victims of the fraud.

As I said, the Government’s focus is on learning from and sharing the lessons from the incident, both through formal reviews and internal discussions to strengthen current activities. Following the publication of Professor Pat Troop’s review of the FSA’s handling of the incident, the FSA and the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs are working together to address the issues raised. In particular, they are looking at ways to strengthen and improve intelligence sharing with relevant partners, and to clarify the responsibilities and roles of the two organisations.

Horsemeat fraud is unacceptable, but that does not mean that the Government were not effectively identifying food contamination and fraud. Meat fraud and product substitution are not new; as my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton pointed out, across the centuries and across the sector as a whole these are things that unscrupulous people have attempted to get away with. In 2012, local authorities carried out more than 18,000 tests for food authenticity, including tests for meat substitution. However, enforcement officers were not looking for the presence of horsemeat. Instead, the focus of testing was for product substitution with more widely available products, such as chicken and pork.

What the horsemeat incident has demonstrated is the widespread and international nature of food fraud, and the need to consider products that are more readily available beyond the UK, to protect consumer confidence. The Government agree that to understand and robustly assess the risks, we need better intelligence sharing. The FSA and DEFRA are jointly working to achieve better intelligence sharing between Government, industry and local authorities. Intelligence is not solely about testing, and given finite resources it is right that sampling and testing by enforcement bodies should remain targeted and risk-based.

The increase in the number of reported incidents of food fraud demonstrates the effectiveness of that targeting, as well as the successful development of detection methods and the priority given to authenticity. The Government also agree that it is unacceptable for any local authority not to carry out food standards sampling, and the FSA will continue to work with local authorities to ensure that all of them meet the standards set out in the framework agreement. Although we all understand the pressures on local government, the matter is very clear and the FSA has also been clear about working with partners in local government to ensure that those standards are delivered.

The Government recognise that they have a role in horizon-scanning for the unknown risks, but this should be done in a manner and on a scale that still represents good value to the taxpayer. That is something that we will need to consider further and it will still need to be based on intelligence for it to be justified. We are already strengthening information sharing between departments, by linking the emerging risks programme and the authenticity programme to improve our ability to horizon-scan the next unknown risk. The FSA has also reviewed its own operational structure to give greater direction and priority to identifying and combating food fraud in the future.

On the issue that a number of hon. Members raised about the report line for the FSA, we have to be absolutely clear that the FSA is a non-ministerial department of Government. It advises other Departments and shares information with them, as I have been saying, but it is not subject in any way either to my own Department or to the Department of Health. It is independent, and its independence is welcomed. Obviously, that it would be independent was the intention of the previous Government in constituting it.

Although we are looking to communicate better the roles and responsibilities of the FSA and DEFRA, the Government do not accept that machinery of government changes in 2010 impacted on the Government’s handling of the horsemeat incident or on the independent status of the FSA. The FSA led the response from day one, with DEFRA and the FSA working closely together throughout to deliver an effective response. It is right that Ministers were held to account for updating Parliament on the situation during the incident; it is right that Ministers took the lead in initiating action at a European level; and it is also right that the FSA led on investigating the incident and taking enforcement action. The FSA leads on enforcement, and it has in place the necessary framework and relationships with local authorities to instigate sampling and testing.

There will always be boundary issues for the Government’s interest in food, and it is our responsibility to ensure that these issues are understood and that we have the measures in place to make them work. The recent horsemeat incident has demonstrated that the FSA and DEFRA can work together to address issues such as food fraud, but we recognise that there is always more to be done to ensure that stakeholders understand where those boundaries lie and why, even if they do not agree with them.

As the Select Committee is aware, the Government’s independent review, “Integrity and Assurance of Food Supply Networks”, will focus on consumer confidence in the authenticity of food products, identifying any weaknesses that could have implications for food safety and authenticity. The review will consider the efficiency of current frameworks and operations, and I am sure that stakeholders will have taken the opportunity to raise their concerns or highlight issues.

The Chair of the Select Committee raised the issue of reviews. It is important to point out that this is a separate review. The Troop review was into the incident itself; this review will now set out where we go from here. It is looking at what we need to do to ensure the integrity of the supply chain right the way across, and we look forward to the interim publication of its findings later in the year.

The “Integrity and Assurance of Food Supply Networks” review is not only focused on Government but will look at the roles, and responsibilities to consumers, of the industry, and at what businesses need to do to support consumer confidence. That is the point that my hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton made when he was talking about the responsibility of the industry. As the Government, we are engaging with this issue and seeking to reassure people that the food chain is secure, but ultimately those involved in the food chain are responsible for it. They are the ones who are selling products to consumers, engaging with producers and taking part in that chain.

My hon. Friend was absolutely right to raise that issue; the Government have a role in this process, but we must ensure that it is those who are involved in the chain itself who guarantee its integrity. The food industry is ultimately responsible for making sure that food is authentic and meets the required standards expected not only by the Government but most importantly, as hon. Members have said, by consumers.

I am sure that, as I am, the Committee is looking forward to seeing Professor Chris Elliott’s interim report in December.

--- Later in debate ---

[Dan Rogerson]

The hon. Lady is absolutely correct. When I was responding to the hon. Member for Ogmore earlier, I thought that he was referring to the NAO report when he talked about “two reports”, rather than the two phases of the work that the Committee did.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

Are you in the NAO report as well? [Laughter.]

[Dan Rogerson]

No—absolutely not.