Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty’s Government how many prosecutions for food fraud in the form of meat substitution there were in each of the last three years.

Local authorities are responsible for prosecuting meat species substitution offences. Generally, these prosecutions are taken forward under regulations relating to the labelling and mis-description of food, rather than under fraud legislation. The Food Standards Agency has taken on the task of compiling a register of successful food law prosecutions and is just completing the first year of data collection on local authority food prosecutions. However, it does not hold definitive data on prosecutions for offences of this nature in the last three years.