Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee

Select Committee statement

We now come to the Select Committee statement on behalf of the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee. Mr Alistair Carmichael will speak for up to 10 minutes, during which time no interventions may be taken. At the conclusion of the statement, I will call Members to ask questions on the subject of the statement. These should be brief questions, not full speeches, and questions should be directed to the Select Committee Chair, not to the relevant Government Minister. Front Benchers, however, may take part in questioning.

I thank the Backbench Business Committee for allocating time for me to make the statement, which marks the publication of the third report by our Committee in this Parliament. Our report is titled “Biosecurity at the Border: Britain’s Illegal Meat Crisis”, and it really is a crisis. It is a crisis that has been brewing for years, if not decades. It is also a crisis that matters not just on the national level but on the individual and personal level. We should never underestimate the impact that animal disease outbreaks have on the mental health of farmers, veterinary professionals and others in our rural communities when biosecurity breaks down. In 2001, over 6 million animals were slaughtered across the United Kingdom following the outbreak of foot and mouth disease. Rural communities were devastated. The cost of the outbreak to our economy would be £13.8 billion in today’s prices. Experts at the time concluded that the infected meat that precipitated the outbreak had been imported illegally. In January this year, foot and mouth disease was again reported, this time in Germany. Experts there told the Committee that it was likely caused by illegally imported food. That single outbreak of foot and mouth disease cost the German economy €1 billion, and it required the culling of 336 animals and the testing of thousands more. In response, the UK Government announced import restrictions, but still, at-risk commercial consignments bypassed border control posts for six days, despite the ban on affected products. We will address that matter in our next report. We have no idea how much unchecked produce was able to enter through personal imports. We do know that, although border officials are now making far fewer seizures of animal products than in the years following the 2001 outbreak, they are seizing unprecedentedly high volumes. Last year, 235 tonnes of illegal animal products were seized at the UK border. Given the low levels of checks taking place, that must be just the tip of the iceberg. Port health workers tell us that they have seen a huge deterioration in the hygiene presentation of illegal meat, and say that shipments are increasing in size. That meat is heading to our high streets, our farms and our kitchen tables. Frontline workers are anxious that a disease outbreak is imminent, and we should share their anxiety. In her evidence to the Committee, the chief vet described port health authorities as our eyes and ears at the border. In that, she is quite correct, but still, Dover is the only port health authority in Britain being funded to support the work of Border Force in seizing illegal meat and dairy products. Even Dover’s funding has been under threat. This year’s funding was secured at the last minute and only after the intervention of stakeholders, including our Committee. We visited Dover and saw the entirely unsuitable facilities in which port health workers are being required to work. We saw vans stuffed with room temperature meat products packaged in plastic bags, newspaper and cardboard boxes. This meat had travelled across Europe, unrefrigerated, from countries where African swine fever is widespread. The Minister responsible for biosecurity committed to visiting the Port of Dover to see the situation for herself. At the time of our report’s publication, she still had not done so. I find that regrettable and very much hope it will be attended to in early course. The relationship between DEFRA and the Dover Port Health Authority is poor. That serves no one’s interest and requires immediate ministerial attention. We know that when commercial imports from certain countries have been banned, criminals have found a new way to make money and are bringing in products undeclared, under the guise of personal imports. DEFRA has reassured us that Border Force is delivering “intelligence-led checks”; we are concerned that this language hides the reality on the ground. The reality is a limited and incomplete intelligence network, strained enforcement capability, and port facilities unsuitable for seizing significant volumes of potentially contaminated meat. At the very least, farmers and the public deserve greater transparency about the risks we face. We have called on the Government to start publishing quarterly data relating to seizures of illegally imported animal products. We have also asked the Government to model the amount of animal products entering Britain, and the risks this poses to our livestock. Meat smuggling was described to our Committee as “the biggest threat to food security we have had for a long time”. We do not know how these animals were reared and slaughtered, or how the meat has been handled or stored. It carries increased risks of viruses, bacteria and parasites that can make people sick, and falls far below the strict standards that we require of British producers and legitimate importers, and that consumers expect. Illegally imported meat and dairy products are being sold online and via door-to-door sales to households and businesses. Illicit products can be found in markets, shops, takeaways and hospitality venues, where consumers trust that the food they are buying is safe and meets high welfare standards. In some cases, meat is misrepresented as being of British origin. We heard that the cost of living crisis is fuelling the market for cheap, illegally imported meat, as is demand for culturally preferred products, like pork from eastern Europe. Other meat and dairy products are illegally brought into Great Britain for personal consumption because individuals are unaware of the prohibitions or because they are willing to take the risk. DEFRA banned imports of most animal products from the EU in April this year, but many travellers do not know what the rules are or why they are in place. We think travel operators should be legally compelled to inform travellers of food prohibition rules for EU countries, as they are for other countries. There is currently no ownership in Government of the issue of illegal imports of animal products. Responsibility is so fragmented across agencies that outdated, inefficient ways of working have been allowed to persist, and the scale of the crisis has escalated to an intolerable tolerable degree. We have called on DEFRA to establish a taskforce to bridge the divides. It should lead on the design and delivery of a strategy for tackling meat smuggling. We also found that Border Force is not adequately fulfilling its responsibility to enforce rules at the border. It has too many competing priorities, and officers lack understanding of the risks and rules associated with products of animal origin. Port health authorities are willing to step up and support Border Force, but are needlessly inhibited by a lack of powers and funding. Such authorities should be given stop, search and seize powers in relation to animal products, and funding for enforcement presence at the border. There is currently no deterrent to meat smuggling, so smugglers are operating with impunity. DEFRA must immediately deliver a plan to start to fine and prosecute repeat offenders and those who are attempting to smuggle significant amounts of animal products. Successive Governments have been aware of the scale and risks of illegal meat imports and have failed to deliver a response proportionate to the challenge. We have identified the risks and some of the solutions. It is essential that DEFRA takes those risks seriously and acts to mitigate them with urgency. The stakes are too high for further inaction.

I am grateful to the right hon. Gentleman for his comments and to members of the Committee for looking at this important issue. I am very proud of the farmers in Newcastle-under-Lyme, whom I meet as often as I can—I am particularly proud of the highest-quality meat and milk that they produce in very difficult circumstances. Just yesterday I met Howard to talk through some of his thoughts and challenges, and one of the key things that came through was the mental health impact on some of our farmers and those in our farming community. I note from the report and the evidence from the Farming Community Network that there are calls for real action. Can the Chair of the Committee say what thought the Committee will give to unpicking some of the real challenges facing farmers up and down the country?

Even as things currently stand, we have a mental health crisis in the farming industry. We know from our own personal community experience from 2001 that that was a moment of genuinely acute mental health crisis from which many people have not yet recovered. The truth of the matter is that one of the biggest challenges facing the livestock sector is maintaining a critical mass of livestock numbers. If we were to go through the same sort of cull that we went through in 2001, starting from where we are today, I think we would risk losing that critical mass, and that could have a catastrophic impact on farmers right across the country.

Obviously, the question of legal commercial imports is slightly different in its operation from what we are bringing to the House’s attention today, but I think we have to look at the whole thing in the round. There are opportunities if we are able to get that SPS deal, and the Committee will be looking at that in the near future. We will be visiting Brussels and speaking to Commission officials about where the deal has got to. We all know it is easy to agree that we need to agree, but actually reaching the agreement will always be the difficult part. Whatever we have by way of an SPS agreement, there will have to be rigorous checks at the border, but it may be that the SPS agreement would make some of that an awful lot easier than it is at the moment, and for everyone—importers, consumers and producers—that has to be good.

As a member of the Committee, I attended the trip to Dover where we saw just how much meat could have been coming in in the white vans that were flooding in. Border Force is very busy and has numerous duties, and the powers and hours for the Port Health Authority were far too limited; it was obvious that it was not able to do as much as it would like. Those poor facilities and that capacity for checks were things that we really thought should be improved and increased, yet Sevington and Bastion Point were sitting underused or empty nearby. Does the Chair of the Committee think that they could and should be repurposed to help with this task?

First, I thank the hon. Lady and all other members of the Committee for their engagement in this report and for the way in which they approach the work of the Committee as a whole. I may be slightly biased, but I really think they are quite excellent in the way they go about their business—I could not ask for a better membership. What we saw at Dover was truly shocking. We are still close enough to lunch that I am not going to give too many details, but the photographs that were provided to the Committee were truly horrendous. The hon. Lady suggests that the control points at Sevington and Bastion Point could be repurposed, which is an obvious solution. The conditions in which the Port Health Authority workers operate were disgraceful: working in big sheds that we probably would not keep cattle in, with holes in the roof and pigeons flying around. Meanwhile, just a few miles up the road, there are purpose-built facilities where workers would at least be able to change into their personal protective equipment and have proper showers at the end of the day. I place on the record the Committee’s gratitude to, and my personal admiration of, Lucy Manzano and her team at the Dover Port Health Authority, who have done a remarkable job and a significant public service in bringing this to the attention of the wider population.

On the Committee’s visit to the Port of Dover, we heard that many seizures of illegal meat include scales and tills—clear indications that the meat would be sold commercially. Most worryingly, as the right hon. Gentleman said, some of those imports are headed straight for farms, so the potential for a devastating outbreak of foot and mouth disease, African swine fever or many other diseases is huge. Does he agree that, regardless of any potential SPS agreement with the EU, we certainly cannot afford to scale back checks if we are serious about protecting British farming?

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his contribution to the Committee’s work, which is—I hope the Whips are here to hear this—a textbook example of how a Government Back Bencher should go about his business in Committee. He is absolutely right that seeing scales was worrying. It is obvious that that product is then going straight to the market and goodness knows where after that. Our real concern is that we are bringing in pork products from eastern Europe and places where African swine fever is already present. A lot of that meat is, we suspect, destined for eastern European workers in our pig industry. One does not have to be Einstein to work out the scale and nature of the risk there. We heard two things. One of the witnesses said that we were one carelessly discarded ham sandwich away from disaster—that is absolutely right. The other thing that we were told was that the possibility of an outbreak of African swine fever could be the death knell for the British pork industry as a whole. To my mind, that really illustrates just how high the scale of risk is here.

I congratulate and thank the Committee for this valuable work. Biosecurity is national security. The pork industry is worth £1.8 billion a year, and the sector is vital to Norfolk, particularly South Norfolk. As others have said, it is estimated that an outbreak of African swine fever would cost £100 million. Does the right hon. Gentleman agree that, in our efforts to protect UK biosecurity, we need also to focus on small ports and airports as places of weakness?

The hon. Gentleman is absolutely right. We risk ending up playing a whole game of whack- a-mole, tightening the controls at Dover and seeing the effort displaced to other communities and ports. Notwithstanding that, the priority is still the short straits, as the significant volume of imports come through them. That all underlines the view of the Committee that what is needed is for somebody in Government to take control of this issue, with a strategy for dealing with it, because there is no point in having the best national security at one port if all we do is displace the effort to others.