It is a pleasure, Mrs Osborne, to serve under your chairmanship and to stand here as both a Minister and a member of the Select Committee—at least in name, if not in application. The House will remove me from the Committee in due course.
Before I get on to substantive matters, let me say that it has been an absolute pleasure and an honour to serve on that Committee for more than eight years, under the excellent chairmanship of the hon. Member for Thirsk and Malton (Miss McIntosh) and also of Michael Jack, who did fine work as Chair of the Committee in the previous Parliament. It is also a pleasure to follow all those who spoke in this debate; they spoke with passion and brought insight. I may not agree with all the conclusions that the hon. Member for Ogmore (Huw Irranca-Davies) has drawn, but I pay tribute none the less to his experience and the care that he has taken in preparing for this debate. As he knows, I have family roots in his constituency, so it is always a pleasure to hear from him.
I am grateful to the Chair of the Select Committee and colleagues for securing this debate, so that we can explore this issue in some depth. As highlighted, the incident has been the subject of a number of reviews and reports, which reflects the level of public concern and the fact that it is essential that consumers have confidence in the food that they buy or are served.
Food fraud is completely unacceptable, and that is what we are dealing with here. Consumers have every right to expect food to be correctly described. It is up to the whole food supply chain to ensure that such an incident does not happen again. As the Committee’s report says, industry’s assurance measures and the action it takes to ensure the traceability of products are key to a sustainable food chain.
As the Committee is aware, the industry is taking its own steps to build consumer confidence. Although the Government should not be closely supervising the industry or limiting its ability to react to market signals, they do have a role in helping to restore consumer confidence and in enforcing EU law.
To help restore consumer confidence, the Government have encouraged industry to continue to give high priority to the testing of processed meat products and the sharing of information. More than 36,000 industry test results have been reported, covering manufacturing, processing, retail, catering and food service, which demonstrates the seriousness with which the industry is taking the need to remain vigilant and to restore consumer confidence in its food.
The Government agree that they have a role in working with businesses from across the food supply chain to identify ways to strengthen the industry and to enable it to respond to the challenges and opportunities that it faces. Regular meetings are being held, chaired by my right hon. Friend the Secretary of State, to ensure that British food is recognised for its rigorous standards and traceability and that our farmers and producers do not get a bad reputation as a result of incidents such as the one involving horsemeat.
Research shows that in the wake of the horsemeat incident, UK consumers have a greater level of trust in British produce, and the industry must welcome and build on that. That point was made by my hon. Friends the Members for Tiverton and Honiton (Neil Parish) and for Brecon and Radnorshire (Roger Williams), as well as my hon. Friend the Chair of the Select Committee in her opening remarks.
During the incident, the Government’s role focused on working with industry and local authorities to establish the scale of the problem, investigating and taking enforcement action against those responsible and prompting action at a European level to deal with some issues that have again been raised today. Our focus is now on learning and sharing the lessons from the incident and on improving the current approach to food authenticity and fraud.
The UK Government reacted quickly when they were alerted to the presence of horsemeat in beef products on sale in the UK by the Food Safety Authority of Ireland. That is backed up by the findings of the Troop review, mentioned by the Committee Chairman and others, into the FSA’s response to the incident.
The Committee has questioned whether the FSA should have done something sooner when the Food Safety Authority of Ireland mentioned that it was developing testing methods to detect horsemeat. I would like to clarify that a competent authority in another member state informing the UK that it is planning to develop a detection method is not the same as a member state informing the UK that it has found evidence of contamination or food fraud. We would hope and expect that any intelligence that another member state had would be shared with us at that juncture. Nothing was brought to the Government’s attention at that point; it was only that the FSAI was developing a test.
Just as we have a programme of work to develop testing to support our enforcement of EU food law, other member states develop methods for testing the authenticity of food. In its evidence to the Committee,
the FSAI stated that it was “surprised” by the results and retested and reconfirmed the results before informing its Government officials and Ministers.
Once the presence of horsemeat in beef products had been identified as potential fraud, rather than unintended contamination, the UK’s response to the incident was rapid and extensive—more rapid and extensive than that of any other member state. An unprecedented level of testing was carried out quickly by industry and local authorities, the results of which were communicated to consumers and shared with the Commission and other European countries. It is to the credit of the industry and enforcement officers that that activity was carried out at pace and effectively, and to UK laboratories’ credit that they demonstrated the ability to up their capacity to meet demands.