Food Fraud

Debate between Ian Swales and Roger Williams

Monday 8th September 2014 Commons Chamber

[Roger Williams]

I thank my hon. Friend for that point, which is made in the Elliott report. Intelligence-led monitoring is also important. Controls on food coming into this country have been tightened at the airports and seaports. Sniffer dogs have been introduced at Heathrow, and I have been there and seen them in action. It was extraordinarily impressive to see dogs being able to find little bits of food that were being brought into the country—not intentionally but because somebody had forgotten they had left a ham sandwich in their suitcase or backpack.

[Ian Swales (Redcar) (LD)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on fighting on this issue. My hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) mentioned checks on food processors. Given the amount of food that comes into this country already processed, is my hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams) satisfied that spot checks and other measures can be undertaken outside the country?

[Roger Williams]

My hon. Friend makes a good point. Of course, because we are in the European Union we expect that all food that comes into this country will have been slaughtered, processed or manufactured to a standard that would be acceptable in this country. Food coming in from third world countries is another matter altogether. One issue that I concentrated on when I first became involved with the issue of food fraud was the smuggling of meat into this country from Africa. There were various types of meat, but the most serious were parts of primates, including gorillas, apes and monkeys, which certain ethnic communities in this country particularly value. It was obvious that there was no scrutiny of the safety of these meats or even what they were. There was a real concern that not only animal diseases but human diseases could be brought in by this means. Much of the meat came from west Africa. The problem of Ebola today shows that we might still face a real danger from this problem.

I certainly welcomed the final publication last Thursday of the Elliott review of the integrity and authenticity of the UK food supply. We waited quite a long time for the report, but it was worth the wait because it is a comprehensive and well set-out document. It demonstrates the UK Government’s commitment to improving the integrity and assurance of our food supply networks. Professor Elliott’s report highlights that the UK has one of the safest food supply systems in the world, with a great deal of work being done to ensure that food is safe to eat and free from chemical and microbiological contamination, and all those involved in the supply of food and those responsible for developing and enforcing legislation should be commended for what has been achieved.

More attention and more resources, however, need to be put into food authenticity and combating food fraud and food crime. At the beginning of the horsemeat problem, the important question arose about what was meant by adulteration and what was meant by contamination. As far as I am concerned, contamination is not the deliberate introduction into food of other substances—it happens by mistake or inadvertently—whereas adulteration is the deliberate introduction into food of mostly lower-priced commodities. That issue was certainly at the heart of the horsemeat scandal.

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[Ian Swales]

While we are on the subject of crime, may I ask what my hon. Friend thinks are the ultimate responsibilities of retailers? Are they not ultimately responsible for what they sell? Does my hon. Friend believe that the right controls are in place, and that the penalties are right? My hon. Friend the Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) mentioned the prices of some of the processed meals involved. Does my hon. Friend not think that the retailers ought to have known that those meals could not have been produced at that price with the proper contents?

[Roger Williams]

My hon. Friend has put his finger on it. As has already been pointed out, price is the driver of food crime, and as Professor Elliott said in his report, if major retailers or processors have a deal that is too good to be true, they should trace it to its source. Both processors and retailers have a real responsibility in that regard. It is no good saying that they have not the facilities or the wherewithal; they have the ultimate responsibility.

--- Later in debate ---

[Roger Williams]

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. I am tempted to give a long list of local butchers in my constituency, but I will confine the list to butchers in my village. Brian George operates a very fine butcher’s shop, and slaughters the animals in the back. I am told by the Welsh Assembly Government that the hygiene standards there are excellent. I also know that it is possible to walk around other butchers’ shops in my constituency, and to be told “This piece of beef came from a bullock belonging to Mr Price of Llanafan”, or “Mr Jones of Drostre”. After the horsemeat scandal, there was a tendency to use local butchers, but, unfortunately, people now seem to be going back to supermarkets and more processed food.

My father always used to say that he would never eat any meat other than in slices, because then he could see where it came from. Once people started mincing it up, he said, there was doubt. That takes me back 30 or 40 years, but it strike me as good advice which some of our retailers could have taken during the horsemeat scandal.

Professor Elliott rightly observed that the main priority should be a “consumers first” approach. That returns me to the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Redcar (Ian Swales) about the interface between the retailer and the consumer. Given that interface, the retailer should take the responsibility.

[Ian Swales]

To press my hon. Friend on one of the points I made earlier, does he feel that the legal responsibilities of the retailer are sufficiently strong and that the penalties on the retailer in this case were sufficiently punitive?

[Roger Williams]

No, my hon. Friend makes a good point, and certainly there was a lack of prosecutions. Where penalties are imposed, they tend to be of a very low order. Some of this large food fraud involves large criminals, probably acting across-country. They get involved because profit from food fraud is equal to that from drug smuggling or human trafficking, yet the chances of being caught are a lot lower, and if they are caught, the penalties are a lot lower as well.

Despite the Government’s having implemented many of the recommendations already, research carried out by Which? that tested 60 takeaway lamb curries and minced kebabs found that 24 of them had been mixed with other meats such as beef and chicken. Worryingly, seven of the samples did not contain any lamb at all. That is particularly worrying to me, given the area I represent and our dependence on the lamb trade. I was very pleased that recently our local authority prosecuted a restaurant that was advertising Welsh lamb, but in which inspectors found nothing but New Zealand lamb. That is obviously a fraud of its own kind—only on a small level, but even at that level, local authorities must take action.

Since the publication of the Elliott report, Which? has conducted another poll through Populus, and it shows that there is still concern among the public. The fieldwork for that research was conducted between 5 and 7 September, and the poll shows that, even after the publication of the Elliott review, over half of people are worried that a food fraud incident will happen again, a third are not confident that the food they buy contains exactly what is stated in the ingredients list, and, a year after the fiasco, nearly a quarter say that in the past 12 months they have changed the type of meat products they buy because they are worried about food fraud.

We welcome the publication of this report. The Government have accepted all the recommendations, but one thing that will give us cause for concern is whether the resources will be available to carry out all the recommendations, and if they are carried out, whether that will be at the expense of other good work that needs to be done in this area. In general, however, I welcome the report and the Government response.