United Kingdom Internal Market Bill — House of Lords, 2020-10-28
Topic: Agriculture
Jeffrey Rooker (Labour, Centre-left): My Lords, at this stage of the Bill, Amendment 8, like Amendment 7, is a probing amendment, but I should just like to comment as an aside on the reference in the amendment to the definition of "food". Most of our discussion on food safety centres on the Food Standards Act 1999 and the Food Standards Agency, but the bedrock of food safety in the country is the Food Safety Act 1990. Thirty years on, that Act, introduced by a Conservative Government, has really stood the test of time. The change made in 1999 was to separate policy for protecting consumers from the department at the time—MAFF, the producer department I do not want to disappoint my noble friend but I shall deal only with animal feed issues. I took the view that there will be plenty of opportunities to raise food issues—of course, I reserve the right to come back to those—but I want to deal with some animal feed issues. There is no lobby and no brief on this; I am simply using my own experience on some aspects and have made a modest internet search for some numbers. It is a multi-billion pound business, and it is crucial for human and animal safety that it is regulated effectively. There are some matters relating to animals—we are talking about food animals—which are all-island matters and which I am not at all clear about, and the Bill does not make them clear Animal disease control is currently an all-island matter on the island of Ireland. I say that for obvious reasons, but does that remain the case under the Bill? That is a point that really needs bringing home. If you looked at the other aspect, particularly in Schedule 1, you would think that we in the UK were isolated. We are not. Northern Ireland is on the island of Ireland, and there are some issues—I will give some other examples—where all-island matters take priority Animal feed is an area worth looking at because, to be honest, it is not considered to be as important as food, although of course it is. I recall that when I was at the Food Standards Agency—this was under the then chief executive, Tim Smith, who of course is currently distinguishedly chairing the agriculture trade commission and others—discussions with Thompsons in Belfast, the largest feed mill in Europe, centred on a scheme for controlling animal feed imports into the island of Ireland. This was industry-led and was to be through very few ports indeed. Today Thompsons operates an animal feed joint venture with R&H Hall in the Republic via Origin Enterprises to provide grain and non-grain ingredients to animal feed manufacturers and the flour milling industry across the island of Ireland. I want to know how that is affected by Clause 2 To give a sense of the importance and scale of livestock, it is much more important to the economies of Northern Ireland and Ireland than it is to the rest of the UK. I will give just one example. If we compare human populations with those of the four-legged food production animals, cattle, sheep and pigs—I have excluded horses, which people can get uncertain about; we slaughter horses for feed but we export them—in the UK the ratio is approximately 0.7 of an animal per person, but in Ireland it is 2.6 animals per person and in Northern Ireland the figure may even be 2.7. So one can see that livestock is much more important to the economies of the island of Ireland than it is to the rest of the UK Animal genetics are just as important on an all-island basis. For example, Elite Sires has been Ireland’s leading provider of high-quality pig semen for 30 years. It is the sole provider of DanBred cutting-edge swine genetics on the island of Ireland, based of course on Denmark’s remarkable success in pig production. It delivers what it says—because I could not argue between one sample of swine semen and another—is the best swine semen in the land all over Ireland at the time when the animals are ready. How is that affected by Clause 2 I mentioned that the safety of feed is important. The Food Standards Agency and Food Standards Scotland are responsible for, and carry out, the function of official controls, to use the technical term, via local authorities. That is the case with most food safety issues as well. However, local authorities, particularly in England, have not in the main taken feed issues as seriously as food. The Food Standards Agency, being aware of that—I am speaking now specifically about England—has taken many steps to try to improve the situation, but the picture in its latest assessment is not a good one. I will give some short quotes from the executive summary of the latest audit for England of the way that local authorities look at animal feed, published as long ago as October 2016. Local authority service plans "had not adequately taken into account the Agency’s National Enforcement Priorities … There had been only limited implementation of the scheme for earned recognition." There was "little evidence" that local authorities "had reviewed the impact of earned recognition on the delivery of official controls" Local authorities were "using an out of date version of the Association of Chief Trading Standards Officers … risk scoring system" Half the local authorities audited "had incomplete feed registers and databases", which are absolutely fundamental to traceability. It said: "Auditors were unable to assess the effectiveness of formal feed law enforcement actions as none had been carried out in the previous two years" Lastly, none of the English local authorities audited had "any specific documented procedures for assessing the accuracy of official feed reports to the Agency". I have to say that if the Government want to check on this situation and there has been no significant improvement in the last few years, that function should probably be removed from English local authorities because they are not up to the job. It is fundamental to human and animal safety.