Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what is their estimate of the annual cost of fortifying flour which the law requires to be fortified with iron, calcium, thiamine and niacin; and whether any of that cost is borne by public funds.

The continued need for the fortification of flour, was last reviewed in 2013. A 2012 Impact Assessment estimated the cost of fortification to be around £2.84 million per year based on the production of 4 million tonnes of flour for food production every year, or around 71p per tonne of flour. This is at most 1/3 of 1% of the flour itself and therefore an even smaller part of the cost of flour products such as bread and cakes. This cost is not borne by public funds.