Draft Mandatory Use Of Closed Circuit Television In Slaughterhouses (England) Regulations 2018

Kerry McCarthy Excerpts

Monday 30th April 2018 General Committees

[Kerry McCarthy (Bristol East) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Hosie. Obviously, I welcome the measure. I have pushed for it for a long time. The fact that the Government have legislated demonstrates their recognition that, as in so many instances, the voluntary approach does not always work to the extent that we would like. As I understand it, all the major supermarkets source meat from slaughterhouses with CCTV, but that is only one end of the market. Supermarkets are concerned about their public reputation and are susceptible to public opinion. There are others, however, that are not so bothered, that go to the smaller slaughterhouses and whose selling practices are far less scrutinised. They do not care about CCTV installation and we are not likely to be able to persuade them to take the voluntary approach. It is only those that are at the top end of the chain that will choose to do that, so it is important that we are resorting to making it mandatory.

Some 900 million farm animals are killed for food each year in this country. People who are aware of my beliefs will know that I do not accept that there is such a thing as humane slaughter, but that does not mean that I do not think that we should not argue for conditions to be as humane as possible, if that is not a contradiction in terms. Animal welfare standards need to be improved, and the food safety element of that is incredibly important. CCTV will go some way towards ensuring that standards are much higher, although as my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud said, unless there is enforcement and scrutiny, with someone watching the CCTV and coming in to check it, it will be meaningless.

There have been several undercover investigations and exposés. Animal Aid and Animal Equality have been mentioned, and I have seen some horrible virtual reality footage of what has happened to pigs in slaughterhouses. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has also done some very good work. In August 2016, through freedom of information requests, it found that there had been more than 4,000 severe breaches of animal welfare regulations in the previous two years in British slaughterhouses. In fact, there had been 9,500 animal welfare breaches, of which nearly half were category 4, which is the most serious. A single breach can include hundreds of animals, so we are not just talking about 4,500 animals that were treated appallingly; we could be talking about many more. The Bureau of Investigative Journalism highlighted instances of cruelty and neglect, and equipment failure, which can all lead to animals being slaughtered in a horrendous way.

I recently asked a series of parliamentary questions about enforcing current standards and following-up where breaches have been identified. The information I got back was shocking. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs stated in its answers that out of the 467 slaughterhouses that the FSA has audited since 2010, 65 received one unsatisfactory audit result and another 70 received multiple, successive unsatisfactory audit results. That means that nearly a third of slaughterhouses have failed their audit in some way in the past seven years, but in that time, only four slaughterhouses have had their approval withdrawn: S Bagshaw and Sons and Simply Halal for “welfare abuses”, and the Cleveland Meat Company and Summers Poultry Products for “serious deficiencies in operational hygiene procedure”. That is two approvals withdrawn for animal welfare and two for food safety.

It seems as though no action is being taken against the dozens of slaughterhouses that have received unsatisfactory audit results. They have not had their approval withdrawn, but have been allowed to carry on with business as usual. They need to be forced to make improvements, but the fact that they seem to be able to fail the audit process multiple times without action being taken suggests that failing once would not be a deterrent to them. There seems to be no suggestion that their approval would be suspended until improvements are made.

The FSA says that it will prevent a slaughterhouse from continuing to operate only if there is an imminent risk to public health or if there are serious breaches in animal welfare. Those are obviously low bars to have set, which means that an awful lot of breaches will be allowed to pass without any action being taken. Numerous potential violations would be of concern to the public if they knew about them, whether or not they cared about animal welfare. Most people would also be concerned if food hygiene was not up to scratch, and we have seen many reports about such failings, as my hon. Friend the Member for Stroud said. The 2 Sisters investigation is not just about conditions in slaughterhouses or animal welfare; it is about the way the carcases are treated as they are processed for sale.

DEFRA admitted to me that the receipt of an unsatisfactory audit result determines only the frequency of future audits and unannounced inspections. In other words, if a slaughterhouse fails an audit once, they are more likely to get checked again. As I have said, however, that does not lead to any action being taken. Certainly for weeks, but potentially for months, the slaughterhouse would be allowed to continue operating and putting out meat that has been produced in deficient circumstances.

Installing CCTV in all slaughterhouses will go some way to preventing lapses in hygiene standards and animal welfare abuses, but it partly depends on where the cameras are positioned and, above all, whether there is important action at the end of it. There is still a hands-off, light-touch approach to audits and inspections at the moment, which the Government have constructed. We need to rethink how we monitor food safety and animal welfare standards before another scandal occurs.

I just want to mention one more thing in passing—as we always expect, Brexit rears its ugly head. I am concerned by reports that I have read—last month in The Guardian, for example—about the growth in the number of high-speed slaughterhouses in the US, where 21 pigs a minute are slaughtered. Sixty Members of Congress wrote a letter saying that

“rapid line speeds present some of the greatest risks of inhumane treatment as workers are often pressured to take violent shortcuts to keep up.”

The undercover investigation of the slaughterhouse where so many pigs were being killed said not only that pigs were covered in abscesses and faeces and other fairly disgusting things, but also that there were workers beating, dragging and prodding the pigs towards slaughter, because they had to keep up with that incredibly fast pace. As I have said, I do not particularly subscribe to the idea of humane slaughter, but certainly that is inhumane slaughter, taken to the nth degree. I should hope that with Brexit, as we open our doors to US trade deals, we will stand firm against that.

Finally—the Minister will know that this is something we have discussed in the past—I think 95% of vets in our abattoirs are EU nationals. There is an issue about what happens if we cannot get the vets to operate in abattoirs and inspect them because they are not allowed into the country. I think at the moment most of them will be allowed to stay and get their five years and residency, but what if we do not attract those vets post-Brexit? I think there is a vet training school in Spain that specifically trains vets to work in abattoirs. Vets in this country do not particularly want to work in them, and we can understand why, as their job is about saving animals’ lives. This is an important issue, which goes to the heart of our debate. There is no point in having cameras recording what goes on if we cannot get our house in order in the first place, and then follow up and make sure that the rules are followed.