I entirely agree with the hon. Gentleman, and am about to discuss trading standards, and how we can restore consumer confidence. If consumers believe that what they buy is different from what the packet says, they will stop buying it. That damages not only dodgy products—and I think some supermarkets have been guilty, under commercial pressure, of buying products at a lower price than they might reasonably have done—but also first-class ones. I agree with the hon. Member for Croydon North about the importance of strong local trading standards, a strong Food Standards Agency, and strong Government controls, to ensure that the highest possible standards for food are maintained in supermarkets. That applies particularly in the present case to meat, and particularly beef, in the context of horse-contaminated products. I agree with the broad thrust of the hon. Gentleman’s speech, and I look forward to hearing from my hon. Friend the Minister how we can be certain to restore consumer confidence.
I want, however, to touch on an aspect of the opening speech that I disagreed with; the hon. Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) also touched on the same point in an intervention. The suggestion seemed to be that if the system in the UK for the control of the killing of horses were somehow better, incidents such as the recent one would be less likely. The hon. Member for Croydon North mentioned the Government’s recent abolition of the national equine database and the operation of horse passports. I remember a debate in this very Chamber in 2005 when my right hon. Friend the Member for Witney (Mr Cameron) argued passionately that horse passports were a complete waste of time, and committed himself to abolishing them when he came to power. I keep reminding the Prime Minister of that, and he has not yet got round to it, but I am confident that sooner or later he may go down that track.
The idea behind the introduction of horse passports was that every medicine administered to a horse would be stamped on the passport. In particular, as the hon. Member for Croydon North mentioned, bute is a common medicine—and not only among racehorses, as he mentioned; often ordinary hacks will be given bute. That is or could be harmful to human beings. It is important that those horses should not go into the food chain. Abattoirs should know if horses have taken it, and prevent that from happening. The idea was that every horse—there are getting on for 2 million of them in the UK; we do not quite know the number—should have a passport. Every time it went to the vet the passport would be stamped, and when it appeared at the abattoir the staff would say, “No, Mr Horse, you have had bute. You can’t come in here. Please go away.”
From the start, that was a ridiculously flawed principle. The basic flaw is that although a horse owner such as me might be persuaded to buy a horse passport on first getting the horse, it is difficult to remember to cancel it when the horse dies. Already, roughly half of 750,000 horse passports in circulation in the UK today are for dead horses. The document is entirely meaningless, and a great many horses—particularly low-value ones, belonging to various groups of people—have no passports at all. The system is blown wide open. Decent, sensible, ordinary horse owners get round to buying them. People who try, criminally, to get their horses into the human consumption chain do not, so the system does not work.
That system failure was compounded by the national equine database. I must pick up the hon. Member for Croydon North on one point: of course the NED did not cost the Government anything. It was the passport-issuing authorities that paid for it. Abolishing it did not save any money; it was abolished because it was not working. An enormous computer, with a list of animals on it that die at the rate of 100,000 a year and are born all over the place, without anyone knowing where they live, is a worthless piece of bureaucracy. It cannot keep an accurate record of where all the horses are. It did not work. It did not even begin to do so, or come close to it. The Government sensibly realised that. I hope that they will go further at some stage and abolish horse passports, challenging the European Union in doing so, but that is another debate.