Food Contamination

Sandra Osborne Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[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.