The hon. Lady is right. She speaks to the spirit and the letter of the amendments, to which I will now turn my attention. Amendments 34 and 35 are critical in view of what has passed before our eyes in the time since the Bill left Committee.
As hon. Members will know, last week, Sodexho, one of the biggest catering firms in the UK and indeed in Europe, which supplies processed meat to schools, hospitals and our armed forces, withdrew all its frozen beef products after discovering adulteration with horsemeat. This is where the race to the bottom and the aim to be the cheapest of all lead us, when the cost of horsemeat going into mince is a quarter of that of good British beef, without appropriate regulation—and enforcement of that regulation.
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People may say, “Well, that only affects poor people shopping the bargain ranges.” But Sodexho also supplies Royal Ascot—what was in those hors d’oeuvres that were passed around?—the Chelsea flower show and the Open golf championship. This is a major issue. In Scotland last week, schools, council leisure facilities and social care establishments were told not to use any current stocks of frozen beef products after the discovery of contaminated beef at a school in Lanarkshire.
On Friday, the Food Standards Agency released the second tranche of test results. The first tranche of a week earlier was revealing enough. The second tranche, submitted by the food industry, revealed that one in 80 beef products had been found to contain horsemeat—[Interruption.] Hon. Members on the other side of the House are discussing—like a “University Challenge” panel, they are conferring—which amendments my points relate to. They are related to amendments 34 and 35 on commercial pressures in the supply chain, as my hon. Friend the Member for Edinburgh South explained.
We have also had the revelation about IKEA. Many people have visited IKEA and, on the way through its “shopping experience”, stopped to sample the meatballs. But they cannot do so at the moment as those meatballs have also been withdrawn. We now know that some catering companies have been withdrawing products on the quiet. Rather than being open, as the big supermarkets have been, and testing, they have been withdrawing products that they suspect have been adulterated before they can be tested. As the shadow Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said, it is totally wrong for companies to recall suspect meat products on the quiet without telling the FSA.
I have one final illustration of why the amendments are so critical, and it relates to evidence from LGC, which is the UK’s designated national measurement institute for chemical and biochemical analysis. It is the national reference laboratory and the host organisation for the Government’s chemist function. In short, it knows what it is talking about. It has made public its findings on the use of phenylbutazone. I shall not quote from it selectively: I shall be fair and quote its first five points, because they are critical to give the overall picture. LGC states that
“the levels of phenylbutazone, if present in horsemeat, are thousands of times lower than any that caused adverse effect in humans…the risk is small and rare, estimated to affect perhaps one in 30,000”.
My quick calculation suggests that one in 30,000 is about 2,000 people in the UK. LGC continues,
“however on a precautionary basis”—
[Interruption.] I can hear the Minister saying “Scaremongering” from a sedentary position, but these are LGC’s words. It says that
“it is important to prevent meat containing phenylbutazone from entering the food chain because the information does not exist to set a safe level in food animals and there is a possibility of adverse effects albeit rare.”
I have read the advice in full. Far from scaremongering, I have quoted the advice from those who advise the Government—