It is a great pleasure to follow the hon. Member for Brent North (Barry Gardiner). Although he represents an urban constituency, he speaks with great knowledge and experience about the food industry, and has a reputation for doing so. May I also draw attention to my declaration in the Register of Members’ Financial Interests?
This topic has not suddenly emerged over the past two and half years; the problem we are talking about today has been a long time coming, and therefore some of the comments from Opposition Members stick in my throat like a dodgy burger. They speak as if this Government have created this problem, but the entire situation has been changing since the second world war, when the proportion of cash an individual spent on their food bill was much larger than it is today. Then, families would have spent 60% of their income on food, but today that figure is much smaller and as such we have lost the context of how valuable our food is.
I drew an analogy with television, but we could say the same about car tyres. A person would never buy second-hand car tyres from someone offering them on the cheap, because they would instantly recognise that their individual safety could be at risk. However, we as consumers seem to have got into a position where we are happy to see the price of food fall and be driven down. We have lost the concept of how valuable our food is, and that has led us to the position we are in today.
The hon. Member for Brent North referred to the fact that the Education Secretary plans to reintroduce cooking and food to the curriculum, which is a great step forward. Two generations of consumer have lost contact with how food is produced and with how to cook raw product, and again, that is to the detriment of our food industry. If the Government can do anything, more education about how to cook food and deal with raw products will mean that consumers are able to buy better quality food for the same money if they learn to shop about and source food from the right places.
Today, UK agriculture finds itself in a different place to the rest of the world, but that is no fluke and comes from bitter experience. The BSE crisis in the UK taught the beef industry valuable lessons about consumer
confidence and how the consumer needs to understand, know and have confidence in a product. Today we know that if we go to our local butcher, not only will they be able to sell us a very high-quality cut of meat or processed beefburger, but they will be able to identify the animal that the beefburger came from, as well as its mother and father. That is the level of traceability in the UK butchery industry today, and UK consumers should understand that. Certainly, when that is compared with some of the points made by the hon. Member for Bristol East (Kerry McCarthy) about the processed meat industry, and with some of the products sold as meat that normal people would not recognise as such, there is a strong message to deliver on behalf of the UK meat industry.
This is not rocket science: the shorter we make the chain, the easier it is to have such traceability, and labelling will be important as we move forward. We heard from the Opposition about how the labelling of our products should be more prominent, yet when they were in power, there were several private Members’ Bills and lobbying by the then Opposition to try to improve labelling and ensure that consumers understood where and how their food was being produced.