There are certainly issues to do with what the supermarkets are sourcing, which is contributing to the problem, but if we do not have a properly resourced system of regulation, consumers cannot be confident that what the supermarkets and other retailers are selling them is what they believe they are buying. I thank the hon. Gentleman for his intervention.
There are serious questions about the role of the supermarkets in forcing suppliers to cut corners to meet commercial demands. There are reports—we will all have read them—of products being bulked up with protein powders containing trace DNA from other animals, with no way of tracing those products back to their origin. There are further concerns about the processing of meat from different animals through the same production equipment, leaving trace DNA behind despite attempts at deep cleaning, as well as about meat from different sources being commingled without any labelling to warn consumers about what they are buying. The National Farmers Union has raised concerns about that, warning
that the drive towards “more for less” risks compromising consumer health, the need for transparency and, ultimately, consumer confidence.
On horses slaughtered in the UK for food, the past four years have seen an 84% increase in the number of animals slaughtered, mostly for export. In 2012, 9,405 horses were slaughtered, but only 1.5% of those animals were tested for phenylbutazone, or bute, as it is more commonly known. That drug is commonly administered to race horses, but it can cause cancer in humans and is banned from the human food chain. Of that small sample, the FSA has confirmed that eight slaughtered horses tested positive, potentially exposing fraud in the system. That risk of fraud was made worse by the Government’s decision to scrap the national equine database last August, which my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) alluded to. That has made it more difficult to trace which British horses are being slaughtered for meat and whether the meat is fit for human consumption.
The Government have chosen to rely on the horse passport system alone. Under that system, 75 different organisations are authorised to issue passports, which contain details of the drugs a horse is given during its lifetime. The British Horse Society confirmed this month that
“with no central database…it is now possible for a horse to be issued with two passports: one in which medication is recorded and an apparently clean one to be presented at the time of slaughter—allowing the medicated horse to be passed as fit for consumption.”
The system is clearly wide open to fraud and abuse.