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

To ask Her Majesty's Government what assessment they have made of whether it is possible to use scientific analysis techniques to establish whether beef has been produced using hormone implants when the amount of hormones in implanted steer beef is lower than the amount of those hormones in non-implanted bull beef.

There are prototype methods that give a good indication of whether a substance is naturally occurring. However, these need further refinement before they can be considered suitably robust and reliable for regulatory use.