Horsemeat

Debate between Steve Reed and Roger Williams

Wednesday 30th January 2013 Westminster Hall

[Steve Reed (Croydon North) (Lab)]

May I start, Mr Amess, by saying what a pleasure it is to serve under your chairmanship for the first time? It is a particular privilege to introduce the debate, because it is the first time I have had the honour to do so since I was elected to Parliament in a by-election last November. I am delighted that the debate is on such an important matter.

At heart, we are debating whether consumers can feel confident about the meat they are buying and eating. People buying what they thought were beefburgers from supermarkets, including Tesco, Lidl and Iceland, were horrified to discover that they contained horsemeat. Muslims, including many in my constituency, were upset to discover that the beefburgers they were eating contained pork DNA, which is forbidden by their religion.

Aside from the shock of discovering that they were eating a completely different animal, what confidence can we have that the meat we buy is not contaminated or unfit for human consumption if we cannot even be sure what meat is in the product in the first place? Of 27 samples tested by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland, 10 tested positive for horse DNA and 23 for pig DNA. One Tesco beefburger, in probably the most celebrated instance, was found to contain 29% horsemeat.

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

I congratulate the hon. Gentleman on obtaining the debate. Does he agree that there is a difference between a product having traces of something in it, however problematic that may be for people’s religious views, and the adulteration of food with large amounts of material, probably for commercial purposes?

[Steve Reed]

I do agree. The problem is that consumers cannot be sure what is going into the product they are buying for consumption by them and their family. I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention.

First, we have to ask whether the Food Standards Agency is still fit for purpose. Let us not forget that it was the Irish authorities and not our own that exposed the problem of horsemeat in beefburgers. Our system has been fragmented by the Government as part of a drive to deregulate. Labelling, food composition, nutrition and food safety used to be dealt with by a single agency and are now handled by three: the Department of Health, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and the FSA. That fragmentation and additional bureaucracy make it much more likely that problems will be missed.

Standards in the British food industry are high, and it is vital that those standards and that reputation are not undermined by the Government’s actions. The FSA’s budget has been cut by £11 million over the past year alone, reducing its capacity to detect contaminated food. At the same time, the swingeing scale of Government cuts to local government has seen funding for local trading standards services plummet by a third from £213 million in 2011-12 to around £140 million this year.