Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many successful prosecutions there have been by each local authority for meat fraud in each of the last five years; what recent assessment he has made of the veracity of the sampling data submitted by local authorities to the UK Food Surveillance System; and if he will make a statement.

The total number of successful prosecutions for meat fraud that local authorities reported to the Food Standards Agency or Food Standards Scotland in each of the last five years is provided in the following table. In each case the prosecution was taken by a different local authority.

Data submitted to the UK Food Surveillance System does not provide a comprehensive picture of samples taken by local authorities and the reported results cannot be used to determine the extent of any specific issue across the United Kingdom. This is because some but not all local authorities report results using the system and sampling is used as part of a targeted approach rather than being conducted on a random and representative basis.