Listeria: Contaminated Sandwiches

John Bercow Excerpts

Monday 17th June 2019 Commons Chamber

[Matt Hancock]

My right hon. Friend—[Interruption.] Not yet. My hon. Friend rightly raises the question of the supply chain, and it is true that the food in question came from North Country Cooked Meats. In turn, we are trying to identify the suppliers to North Country Cooked Meats to get to the real root of this outbreak. He is quite right to identify that this is a supply chain issue, and that there is a complex supply chain in operation.

I join my hon. Friend in commending the work of Public Health England. Within days, it spotted the links between individual cases and, from a local incident, made this into a national incident. At the appropriate moment, it raised the issue with the chief medical officer and with Ministers in the Department, and we could then explain the problem to the public. Its work has identified the problem, and undoubtedly it has potentially saved lives.

[Mr Speaker]

I hope the hon. Member for Stone (Sir William Cash) will not be saddened by the fact that he is not yet a member of the Privy Council. After all, he is a Staffordshire knight, he has served his constituency without interruption in this House for 35 years, and I remind the House that the hon. Gentleman has a whole chapter named after him in the late Hugo Young’s estimable tome on Britain’s relationship with Europe. There is a chapter in the name of Mr Bill Cash.

[Dr Philippa Whitford (Central Ayrshire) (SNP)]

I, too, would like to express our sympathies with the families of the five patients who lost their lives, but also the four who remain critically ill. Obviously, we do not know what outcome they face.

As the shadow health spokesperson highlighted, these sandwiches were sold to 43 trusts, and while there have been no cases since 25 May, the incubation period of listeriosis is 70 days, so will surveillance of those 43 trusts continue alongside the Health Secretary’s investigation?

The Food Standards Agency published a report in 2014 about the dangers of hospital food. It cited 32 failures, including sandwiches spending hours outside fridges, and fridges often not being cold enough. Indeed, it has been highlighted that hospital sandwiches have been the commonest source of listeria outbreaks over the past two decades.

As the Health Secretary says, simple cases are often a matter of people being unwell for a few days, but listeria poses a major threat to pregnant women, who may lose their child, and is life-threatening for people who are already ill. Will the Health Secretary therefore pay particular attention in his review to why on earth people who were seriously ill or frail were being fed sandwiches? Someone who has no appetite and is recovering from illness is simply not going to be tempted by a pack of sandwiches. That really makes the case for bringing food preparation in-hospital and producing tempting meals, because nutrition is critical to recovery.