Food Fraud

Roger Williams Excerpts

Monday 8th September 2014 Commons Chamber

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

I beg to move,

That this House has considered food fraud.

First, I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting the debate on this important and topical issue. I must say that some of us had anticipated that the Government business would take rather longer this afternoon and that this debate would start rather later. I was given the information that we might have the debate this evening rather late last week, and despite the best efforts of my staff to contact right hon. and hon. Members to urge them to make a contribution, the message obviously got out rather late. Perhaps there was not much contentious business to debate today, either. Nevertheless, the debate is topical, coming soon after the Elliott report, which the Government commissioned following the horsemeat scandal of just over a year ago. I should declare my interests related to meat production, which appear in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests.

I first became interested in food crime when I was elected in 2001. We were in the middle of a foot and mouth disease outbreak, and the election had actually been postponed for a month until the first Thursday in June so that the outbreak could be contained and dealt with. Unfortunately, it went on well after the election, particularly in my constituency. Thousands of sheep were slaughtered on the Brecon Beacons in an attempt to control the disease, which did happen. At that time, farmers were concerned about the lack of checks taking place at the ports on meat coming into this country. They were particularly concerned about the seaports through which meat was imported and the airports through which illegal meat was thought to come. I tabled a ten-minute rule Bill to ask the Government to re-examine the checks and balances, and that was what happened.

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

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. Does he agree that the lesson that we have learned about food fraud is that we need spot checks on processors so that they do not know we are coming? We should go to them and find out exactly what sort of meat they are processing so that we can stamp out fraud, rather than carry out general testing all the time, which is expensive.

[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.

[Mr David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD)]

My hon. Friend will remember that I had some involvement in the problems at that time. It was important early on to establish a threshold for contamination/adulteration that made sense. Otherwise, we would have been in the absurd position of testing every piece of meat and finding that it was contaminated simply because somebody in the room might be shedding human DNA or because the meat had been sitting in a butcher’s shop where beef or pork sausages were not in separate airtight compartments. The level of the threshold, it seems to me, was one of the most important early advances we made in understanding the issue and ensuring that we were not attacking the wrong problem.

[Roger Williams]

I commend my hon. Friend for the work he did right at the beginning of the horsemeat scandal. He provided us with greater clarity about what was involved and about the difference between contamination and adulteration. Of course, contamination is not something that should be taken lightly in its own right. Halal meat contaminated by pork, for example, is a very serious matter for the religious beliefs of some of our communities. I do not in any way view contamination as of little interest; it is of great interest, but it must not be confused with the deliberate adulteration of food.

Food fraud is corrosive of consumer confidence, which has ramifications right through the food chain. The horsemeat contamination incident last year is an example of such a damaging effect on the food industry and on consumer trust. After “Horsegate”, a poll showed that only 56% of consumers were confident that the food they bought was what it claimed to be—a rather shocking statistic. This figure is far too high, and it is one of the reasons why it is so important that we are having this debate today.

Small businesses are especially vulnerable to food fraud, and according to the Elliott review, many have said they are struggling to stay in business because they are competing against those who cheat. That goes for farmers, too, as they grow the raw ingredients for the food industry and rely heavily on consumer confidence. It is essential to safeguard this industry.

[Neil Parish]

I thank my hon. Friend for giving way a second time. Does he agree that there is huge pressure on the processors to reduce their prices, especially from some unscrupulous retailers? Of course, if we drive the price too low, beef cannot be put in the beefburgers and other things start to get mixed in with them. Although retailers are not directly responsible for what happens, I think they play a rather bad part in the whole saga.

[Roger Williams]

My hon. Friend is completely right that food fraud is price-driven—there is no doubt about that. Food adulteration and fraud are as old as history, as we know from many centuries of experience. The watering down of milk was one such example, but an even more heinous crime is the watering down of beer, which should carry an especially heavy penalty!

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

Is there watered-down beer in Brecon?

[Roger Williams]

We do not have any examples in Brecon; it is mostly down in south Wales! But the history books are full of examples of this sort of thing.

As I was saying, it essential to safeguard this industry. Food and farming is the UK’s largest manufacturing sector, contributing £96 billion to the economy and employing almost 4 million people. It is essential to keep up confidence in the UK, while also protecting the reputation of our food abroad.

Another point inn Elliott’s proposals is the setting up of a cross-Cabinet Committee on food safety and food crime. I fully agree with that recommendation and I am glad that the Government have accepted it.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing this debate and thank him for giving way. Particularly in the light of the splitting of the roles and responsibilities of the Food Standards Agency in 2010, was he surprised that some sort of cross-Government or cross-Cabinet regular systematic group was not established to take account of that fact?

[Roger Williams]

The hon. Gentleman makes a very good point—one that is addressed in the Elliott report and one that the Government have accepted, as I said. I am very pleased that the Government have accepted all the report’s recommendations, so we should pay tribute both to the report and to the Government’s response to it.

Following on from the hon. Gentleman’s point, there was such a cross-Government forum for co-ordination on food at Cabinet level until May 2010. Up to that point, there was also more clarity on the responsibilities for food, as the FSA then had the responsibility for authenticity, testing and policy on compositional labelling of food, as well as on nutrition policy, which subsequently went to the Department of Health.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for generously giving way again. In his interim report, Professor Chris Elliott made it clear that he wanted to see both responsibilities returned directly to the FSA. In his subsequent final report—he has made it clear that it is because of the political difficulty—he has stepped back a little from that, but the suggestion is that he would still like to see this done. What does the hon. Gentleman think about that? Should these responsibilities be returned to the FSA?

[Roger Williams]

If the hon. Gentleman reads the full report by Professor Elliott, he will find that he responds to the concern that the final report took quite a long time to come out. He makes it very clear that none of the recommendations in the final report is the result of any political pressure, but are the result of his committee looking at the issue and coming up with what he believes are the best proposals for protecting food and consumers.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

No doubt the Minister will correct me later if I am wrong, but I believe that Professor Chris Elliott said he was loth to include the full recommendation in the interim report—that is, the recommendation that all the responsibility should be returned to the FSA—and made it clear that that was because of the political difficulty of doing so. I make that point purely for the sake of accuracy.

[Roger Williams]

I am sure that the hon. Gentleman will develop his point further when he makes his own speech, and that the Minister will do so as well.

[Miss Anne McIntosh (Thirsk and Malton) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing the debate. As he has already pointed out very eloquently, the Government will be setting up—at a very early date—a cross-departmental Committee, which I think will prevent the same thing from happening again.

On Thursday, the Minister did not have time to respond to an important question that goes to the heart of this issue, namely the question of what is happening in regard to traceability and labelling at European Union level. I hope that we shall be able to stay here all evening and hear about that at first hand from him.

[Roger Williams]

As always, the Chairman of the Select Committee has made a very good point. I listened to what she said on “Farming Today”. Was it on Thursday? I cannot remember. When one is up very early in the morning, the days may not be readily identifiable. Anyway, the hon. Lady made the very good point that the real problem with the horsemeat scandal was that we had never identified the point at which the horsemeat entered the food chain. There have been a number of prosecutions, but they have taken place on a very small scale. Whoever perpetrated this fraud on such a large scale is still out there, and is still, perhaps, waiting for an opportunity to commit either the same or a similar crime.

The real problem is that we do not know where that horsemeat came from. Were the animals slaughtered in a registered slaughterhouse? Were they slaughtered in a farm barn? Was the meat properly looked after? As it turned out, there was not, we understand, a very big threat to public health, but that may have been due more to luck than to judgment.

[Miss McIntosh]

In order to prevent a Select Committee love-in, may I press my hon. Friend a little further? I think that the key proposal from Professor Elliott is the proposal for a food crime unit, with intervention by the police. However, even a close reading of the Secretary of State’s written statement does not make immediately clear what powers the police will have. Perhaps my hon. Friend has had more time to look into the matter than I have.

[Roger Williams]

I have not, but I was going to mention the establishment of a police crime unit, which I think is essential. This was criminal: laws were broken, and people should face the consequences. I hope that the new unit will ensure that those people are brought to book in future, that they are named and shamed, and that they will not be able to have a role in the food industry again.

[Neil Parish]

I thank my hon. Friend for indulging me a third time. I rather fear that a few small operators may have been singled out for what happened, and that there are some very big guys out there who have never been thoroughly investigated.

[Roger Williams]

That is the point that I was trying to make. There have been a number of arrests, but on a very small scale. Certainly the prime operator in the crime has not been identified and brought to book. It is important for there to be a police involvement, but it is also important for there to be an international police involvement. As the horsemeat scandal demonstrated, the food chains are very long and convoluted, and the people involved often do not actually handle the meat at all. They are traders who buy and sell it without ever knowing its quality or composition. It is therefore essential for an international police view to be maintained.

[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.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

The hon. Gentleman is making a very good and wide-ranging speech on the basis of his experience. He mentioned European and international co-operation, whose importance Professor Elliott has stressed strongly and repeatedly. Did he share my concern when, only a few months after the height of the horsemeat scandal, the European Commissioner for crime and justice—who deals with such collaborative approaches—remarked how preposterous it was that, at a time when we were seeking international collaboration, the coalition Government were seeking opt-outs on 130 areas of European co-operation on that very issue?

[Roger Williams]

I think that the hon. Gentleman is trying to introduce a political point which is far outside the scope of the debate.

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on securing the debate. Let me return it from the political point-scoring of the hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) to the fact that we all support the fundamentals of the report. More specifically, and more importantly, does the report not ram home the point that our constituents should be buying from their local butchers whenever possible, because they offer the greatest possibility of traceability in the food chain?

[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.

--- Later in debate ---

[Miss McIntosh]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention. My hon. Friend the Member for Brecon and Radnorshire has made a similar point. I believe that the new provisions will address this; the use of the criminal law is important. The fact that the City of London fraud police were invited to carry out the examinations was illuminating, in a sense. They are very skilled in tackling business fraud and paper crime. I shall elaborate on that point later.

The second development, which I hope will be long-lasting following the horsemeat scandal, is the emergence of shorter supply chains. A number of hon. Members have already mentioned the comments of the Food and Drink Federation and the testing that has been carried out. We must not forget the cost of that testing. I hope that the Minister will be able to confirm that such testing will be more regular. I welcome the fact that there will be unannounced testing and auditing of food companies. Will he confirm that the testing will take place not only on the basis of risk assessment?

We can see the lengths to which the retailers are now going from the briefings that they are issuing. We must not forget that they were not necessarily in the best place. One supermarket—a leading household name—had not checked the integrity of its supply chain for months, if not years. That simply cannot be allowed to happen again. The Food and Drink Federation has flagged up certain questions for retailers. It has asked them to identify their key raw materials, asking the simple question, “Where do they come from?” It also asks them to assess how resilient their supply chain is, and how they protect their business from food fraud. This shows just how far the food industry has come.

Like other hon. Members, I was approached by Which? magazine in advance of today’s debate. I took the precaution of contacting my local authorities in North Yorkshire. I am sure it took them time and probably some expense to go through the recent testing, but I have reams of results from North Yorkshire county council, Hambleton district council, Scarborough borough council and Ryedale district council. I say to Which? that it would be helpful to know how extensive its survey was, because such surveys can be alarmist if the message goes out to consumers that our food is in any way unsafe to eat, and we have come on a long journey since the first horsemeat adulteration was found in January 2013. In welcoming this evening’s debate, it is important to accept that the Select Committee has not had the chance to consider collectively the final report and recommendations of Professor Elliott on food security, but it is very welcome that the Secretary of State and the Government have announced that they will accept all the proposals. I am delighted that the two reports on contamination of beef products and on food contamination that the Committee adopted last year form part of this evening’s debate.

[Roger Williams]

One important part of the report is where Professor Elliott says that he anticipates that the Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the House of Lords Select Committee on Science and Technology will be keeping a watching brief on how the recommendations are put into place.

[Miss McIntosh]

Indeed. I wish to record how pleased I am that Professor Elliott has agreed in principle to come to discuss his final report findings with us.

It is a matter of regret that no prosecutions leading to conviction have been brought—one might say that the horse has already bolted.

--- Later in debate ---

[Roger Williams]

I voiced a slight concern at the beginning of the debate that I thought the seriousness and importance of the subject might be compromised by the small number of hon. Members present, but that concern has been confounded by the quality of the contributions made. I thank all Members who took part, including the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick), my hon. Friend the Member for Somerton and Frome (Mr Heath), the Chair of the Select Committee, the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh), and the hon. Member for York Outer (Julian Sturdy), for their contributions and a number of helpful interventions on the subject.

Professor Elliott set out eight pillars for the work that needs to be done. Paramount are the quality and reputation of British food and the rights of the consumer. I am sure that the House, the House’s Committees and Committees in the other place will take an interest in how the Government deliver on their commitment to accept all the report’s recommendations. We look forward to continuing that work.

Question put and agreed to.

Resolved,

That this House has considered food fraud.