[Mr David Amess in the Chair] — Horsemeat

Part of the debate – in Westminster Hall at 10:34 am on 30 January 2013.

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Photo of David Heath David Heath The Minister of State, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs 10:34, 30 January 2013

It is not uncommon in inexpensive burgers, for example, to use bulking material such as beef protein, and it is not illegal to do so. The EU labelling regime changes to which the hon. Member for Ogmore referred will require such material to be more specifically labelled in future. I agree that it is a difficulty for those who are trying to enforce compliance because it is obviously much more difficult to identify the speciation of a brown powder than a rump steak. The hon. Member for Croydon North points to a difficulty, and we must be aware of it and consider what we can do about it.

I want to deal with some of the broad points that were raised. First, it is simply not the case that the system has been fragmented and, suddenly over the past two years, no one has known what anyone is doing. There was a change in 2010, but the Food Standards Agency has always been the key player in food safety and analysis, including competition. It has always worked incredibly closely with trading standards departments throughout the country which often do the testing at local level. The Department of Health has always had parliamentary responsibility for answering for the Food Standards Agency in response to questions from hon. Members. None of that has changed.

The only change in 2010 was in labelling policy, which was returned from the FSA to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs because we knew that there would be issues in the EU about country-of-origin labelling and we wanted to have a clear handle on that. Ministers in my Department were inevitably involved in those negotiations. They were going to be advised by civil servants in the FSA or the Department, and it seemed more sensible for them to work with those in the Department. That was the change that was made in 2010, and it does not imply fragmentation of responsibility. There is still a close working relationship between us and the FSA, and I do not think anyone would seriously challenge that or the close working between the FSA and trading standards departments.

Secondly, another charge was that the FSA’s overall budget has been reduced. That is a matter for my colleagues in the Department of Health, but let us be clear that that is not an operational reduction, but a result of the merger with the Meat Hygiene Service, which has produced economies of scale by restructuring support staff and accommodation charges, and enabled us to save money. Saving money is a good thing if it can be done without detriment to the service. We must be clear about that.

Thirdly, there is a feeling that there are vastly fewer trading standards officers around the country and that the service is denuded of capacity. I accept that there are fewer trading standards officers, but the scale of that reduction is nothing like what has been suggested. Local authority returns suggest that on 31 March 2012, 2,709 people were engaged in UK food law enforcement, which is a 2.3% reduction since the previous year, and a 6.1% reduction since 2009-10. I am concerned about that reduction and the priorities that local authorities are choosing to make in what they do because food law enforcement is a key part of their work. I would encourage them to ensure that their priorities are the same as those of residents in their area. However, the reduction in the level of testing is not huge or swingeing.

We sometimes talk about the number of samples taken, but we should distinguish between the number of samples and the number of tests done on them. We are becoming more and more sophisticated in what we can provide. I will give an indication of some of our work in the Department. One policy area is the research that we commission every year into new methods of testing for compliance of foodstuffs. We put £450,000 into that each year.

DNA testing is by no means the only tool available for testing. Stable isotope testing is being developed and is a valuable tool. Proteomics are a key test which is more often used in ELISA—enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay—which gives similar findings of speciation and origin to DNA, but at a lower cost. Metabolomics involves looking at metabolites in food. All those tools are being used to ensure that the service we provide is as effective as possible.

Let us not run away with the idea that we have a supine, inefficient service in this country that never catches anything, and the wonderful Irish can do it, but we cannot. Some of the things that have been found and dealt with over recent years include buffalo milk adulterated with cow’s milk; fruit juice adulterated with sugar and water; maize adulterated with rapeseed oil; the identification of basmati rice from its origin; the speciation of meat and fish, making sure that no offal and blood proteins are in meat products; the origins of beef; traditional breeds—distinguishing between one breed and another—the origin of fish, whether chicken has been previously frozen; and production methods, so whether something is organic, as it says it is on the packet. We test for all those things. We occasionally find non-compliance and we deal with it, so let us get away from the idea that somehow we are either complacent or have ineffective protection in this country.