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for extra resources, particularly in an area such as London, where there is a high ethnic minority population and a need for the translation of material and mutilingual training. My borough has made a start in this respect. I could give the House some examples, but time does not allow me to do so.We need extra resources and funds to ensure the success of mandatory training for food handlers. The funds of £30 million promised to local authorities will, as my hon. Friend the Member for Preston (Mrs. Wise) said, be swallowed up by the poll tax. In any case, that is a woefully inadequate figure and will not enable the officers to perform their tasks and meet their responsibilities. The criteria for the distribution of those funds are wrong. I hope that they will not be distributed merely on a pro- rata basis--the number of food premises--or a system based on population because that would be unfair. The criteria should be based on deprivation and poverty indicators, taking into account a borough's housing, unemployment and other social issues. All those indicators reflect the standard of food outlets which those boroughs provide. The issue of labelling has been confined to the Bill's regulations. However, all food should show the details of all the ingredients used in its production, including details of processing, chemical treatment and full nutritional labelling.
The London Food Commission and the Institution of Environmental Health Officers have said that the advantages and safety of food irradiation have not been clearly demonstrated and they are worried about unscrupulous people taking advantage of it. It may kill most of the bacteria, but it will leave harmful toxins in the product and destroy nutrients such as vitamins.
There should be a consumer education programme. I suggest a new levy on food advertisements, which could then be used on a health and consumer education programme. The Government should take the lead on that.
The Bill could have many more teeth. With the Bill the Government have warmed the plate, but they have not yet guaranteed a disease-free dinner on it for all our citizens.
8.54 pm
Mr. James Couchman (Gillingham) : I shall be brief, because a number of the points that I wished to make have already been made ad nauseam. I start by declaring my interest : for 20 years I have been involved in licensed catering in the pub business. I still run pubs in London and, therefore, I have an interest in the Bill. I welcome the fact that my right hon. Friend the Minister has decided on registration rather than licensing. All licensed caterers are, by definition, already licensed by the justices. When licences are granted, environmental health officers have the opportunity to make representations to the court about whether they think that the prospective licensees are fit and proper people to run licensed catering establishments.
I am concerned by the enormity of the task confronting my right hon. Friend the Minister. It seems that the Bill will catch not only all licensed premises and unlicenced food shops and premises, but all shops retailing food and anyone who sells confectionery. Therefore, virtually every garage in the country will come within the net of the Bill.
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I wonder exactly how my right hon. Friend proposes to offer a proper enforcement service for registered food sellers.Irradiation seems to have been covered by almost all the speakers in the debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Ludlow (Mr. Gill), who has unfortunately had to leave the Chamber, summed up the issue admirably when he said that he saw it as just the latest in a chain of methods to preserve food beyond what might be called its natural shelf life. I am in favour of allowing irradiation on a strictly controlled basis, with the labelling for irradiated food promised by my right hon. Friend. I understand that, where finished and prepared food is offered on a plate, it is impossible to label it, but we are obliged, under other provisions, to show what we are going to serve by way of menus in windows and on tables. No doubt proper organisation of menus will allow us to show whether food has been irradiated.
My main point relates to enforcement. Environmental health officers, who tend to be generalists rather than specialists, already have a wide variety of duties. Undoubtedly the Bill will add substantially to their burdens. For some time there have been many vacancies for environmental health officers throughout the country. As long as 15 years ago, when I was vice- chairman of an environmental health committee, we had great difficulty in recruiting environmental health officers. There is nothing new about that, and the Bill will make even more urgent the need for more environmental health officers to be trained and recruited.
I wish to look beyond training and recruitment because I want a consistent standard of enforcement throughout the country. Unfortunately, all too often examples of personal prejudices influence the actions of environmental health officers. I suppose that the most notorious recent case was the capricious and vexatious prosecution of La Gavroche by the city of Westminster on the advice of its environmental health officers, Parker Brown and MacGregor. It seems that not only individual EHOs have prejudices, but also local authorities. They sometimes regard this as a duty which they can use to extend their empire and act in a way that certainly builds up cynicism and scepticism on the part of those involved in the premises that come within their ambit.
There is a parallel with health and safety legislation ; the same officers are responsible for the enforcement of health and safety legislation. It is possible to make almost any licensed catering premises unworkable by extreme zealousness and over-onerous demands for health and safety projects.
As my right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food said, some environmental health officers make demands for tiling, untiling and retiling. I was asked to put tiles on the floor of a beer cellar. I do not know whether that environmental health officer had ever penetrated a beer cellar, but when a 10 or 22-gallon keg is dropped on a tile floor the tiles shatter. He seriously wanted me to tile the floor so that I could throw my barrels around and shatter the tiles. Because of instances such as that, we need to ensure--through secondary legislation, codes of practice, and the directions that my right hon. Friend the Minister must give--that we achieve consistent and sensible enforcement.
Some environmental health officers are extremely helpful with their advice and guidance. They give
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instruction to people who perhaps do not know as much as they should about food safety and food hygiene. They build up confidence and co-operation. It is a desirable aspiration of the Bill to build a partnership between environmental health officers--with their guidance and advice--and food sellers. The Bill should be regarded not as draconian, a penalty, or something that should be feared by food sellers, but as a sensible basis for their entirely proper and legitimate business. I wish my right hon. Friend well in taking the Bill through the House.9 pm
Mr. Alan W. Williams (Carmarthen) : I welcome the Bill, because 90 per cent. of it is positive and helpful. It will help to improve standards of hygiene in shops and to educate the consumer. My reaction to the Bill is similar to my reaction to the Environmental Protection Bill--I am a member of the Standing Committee on that Bill--as I think that it makes steps in the right direction, but they are small steps and the Bill has major omissions. For example, it does not tackle food production and processing ; animal feeding at the farm ; what is added to foods in food processing ; pesticides ; or intensive farming. We know that the problems of salmonella, and now of bovine spongiform encephalopathy, relate to animal feeding, yet the Bill contains nothing to remedy that. It attempts to blame the shopkeeper, the retailer and the housewife for the problems with food poisoning.
I am pleased to note that, if there is one topic that hon. Members from both sides of the House have focused on during the debate, it is food irradiation. However, food irradiation is hardly mentioned in the Bill-- just two lines in clause 17. The ban on irradiation is being lifted by stealth, yet that is the part of the Bill with which most people are concerned.
When food is irradiated, the molecules are damaged. It breaks those molecules randomly and creates reactive species--free radicals. Those free radicals recombine in random ways to produce all types of products. I have no doubt that some of those will be carcinogenic and others mutagenic and that they present a hazard to life. The Minister has said countless times that that is not the case. However, most of the research work has been sponsored by the Atomic Energy Authority, so it is not neutral, like academic research, which has found kidney damage, chromosome damage and tumours in animals that have been fed on irradiated food. Academic research has shown evidence of the sort of damage that I expect to occur. The dosages involved are enormous--they are 10 times the maximum permitted in the United States. That is equivalent to 100 million chest X-rays. Those are lethal amounts.
Given the controversy surrounding irradiation, it is not surprising that it has been banned in most countries. It is allowed in only 35 out of 140 nations ; in the remainder, there is a complete ban. That has been the position in Britain until now. Out of the 35 countries that allow irradiation, only 21 use it and then only on a narrow range of foods--so much so that less than 0.1 per cent. of one thousandth of food consumed in Europe is irradiated.
The Minister said earlier that there are problems with herbs and spices and that ethylene oxide is an unsatisfactory preservative. If we were concerned only
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with herbs and spices, I do not think that the National Federation of Women's Institutes and all the consumer organisations would be so much up in arms. My fear is that as irradiation comes into the Bill by stealth, there will be no proper definition of what food may be covered. It is clear to me by now that the Government intend it to cover a wide range of foods.An article in The Times last Friday had the headline : "Irradiation could halve food poisoning'".
It quoted Professor Bevan Moseley, the head of the institute of food research in Reading, as saying that, as poultrymeat is responsible for over half our salmonella cases, the problem would be halved with irradiated poultrymeat. It frightens me that the Government are thinking of irradiation as the major answer to the salmonella epidemic. The proper answer is to clean up factory farming and animal feeding, and to stop some of the current practices in farming. Two wrongs do not make a right and irradiation is a technological fix for a problem that should not exist in the first place. The real answer lies in clean farming.
The irradiation of poultry is allowed in only 11 countries in the world. In a parliamentary question this week, I asked how many countries used irradiation as a method of preservation for poultrymeat. The reply was that only two countries have used irradiation to some extent, whereas 138 countries have not. In other words, over 98 per cent. of the countries of the world do not use irradiation on poultrymeat. It disturbs me that Britain will be a leader in that very wrong direction.
Many hon. Members have referred to the problems of testing. There is no test for irradiation and it is significant that the tests being considered are for free radicals or mutagenic products. It gives the game away that the Government are considering those damaging materials as a method of testing irradiated foods.
The Government should listen to public opinion on this matter. It is overwhelmingly hostile. Many sorts of non-political organisations, the consumer groups and the supermarket chains have come out decisively against irradiation. The most important is the British Medical Association which is cautionary in its attitude to food irradiation. I hope that when the Bill receives a detailed consideration, the Government will withdraw the provisions dealing with food irradiation.
9.7 pm
Mr. Keith Raffan (Delyn) : I know that there is a shortage of time before my hon. Friend the Minister has to reply, so I shall try to be as brief as possible. Nobody can be opposed to the Bill, based as it is on the principle of providing greater protection for the consumer. The question is whether it achieves that laudable aim and whether it goes far enough. Those questions especially concern me, as my right hon. Friend the Minister is aware. My constituency suffered the worst ever food poisoning outbreak--as the media said, perhaps in their usual exaggerated fashion. However, it was the most severe this century in western Europe. Five hundred and twenty-one people were infected by salmonella typhimurium, 54 of them were admitted to hospital and two subsequently died. That occurred at the end of July 1989.
On 6 November 1989, the Welsh Office launched an internal review of the handling of that outbreak to learn lessons for the future. It said that the review's findings would be considered in connection with the Bill. The
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review is still being carried out, and it will be another month before it is completed. I should be grateful if my hon. Friend the Minister could give me an assurance that the review's recommendations, where appropriate, will be incorporated in the Bill in Committee. That is not only very important to me and to my constituents. These are lessons of national application.The Bill will provide the Minister with flexible powers to make regulations, as many hon. Members have said. Having read through the written evidence submitted to the Welsh Office internal review from Clwyd health authority and Delyn borough council, I know that they did not agree on much, but there are two points on which they agreed which I want to bring to my hon. Friend's attention.
Food businesses involved in the preparation, retailing and distribution of "high risk" foods, prepared foods such as cooked meats, should be placed under a statutory duty to maintain complete and accurate lists of food outlets to which any such food has been distributed, and those lists should be immediately available on demand to local authority EHOs. They should also be under a statutory duty to fix to individual wrappings of food clearly legible labels identifying the packer and preparer of the food, together with the date of its preparation.
During the salmonella outbreak in north Wales and in the north-west last July, lists of food outlets from the two companies implicated were not immediately available. In fact, they took a day to complete, and they were then incomplete, and they had to be added to over succeeding days. They were incomplete because of inadequate records, even though computers were available.
Labelling must be detailed and rationalised to enable the tracing of the source of a product so that detailed warnings can be given to the consumer. During last summer's outbreak, there was a lack of information which led to unsatisfactory blanket warnings being given to the public. Those were the two points on which the health authority and Delyn borough council are agreed, and they are both important.
Clause 20 allows for registration and licensing, although it allows for licensing only when "necessary or expedient", as the Bill says. I regard that as too flexible, too loose. I want a licensing system for all "high risk" food premises--in other words, those dealing with open foods--giving local authorities the power to refuse or withdraw licences.
Clause 24 covers training, and many hon. Members have dealt with that issue. The provision says :
"A food authority may provide training courses in food hygiene for persons involved in food businesses".
I would prefer it to say that an authority should provide training courses. Indeed, such authorities should be under a statutory duty to do so. Of the 118 positive cases of salmonella in Delyn last July-August, 28 were food handlers, a quarter of the total. That indicates the importance of food hygiene training for all food handlers, and that training should be updated every three years. As for the financial and manpower effects of the Bill, it is extraordinary--as the Minister conceded on 27 July of last year, when he made his original statement--that there are no centrally held statistics covering local authorities' expenditure and time spent on enforcing food law. He said that he was sending out a questionnaire to local authorities to obtain details of exactly how much time EHOs were spending on that aspect of their activities. He rightly said that they had a wide range of activities--in my view, far
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too wide. There are not enough of them, as many hon. Members have said during the debate. I hope that, when replying to the debate, the Minister will say whether those questionnaires have all been returned to the Department and if they will be published.The Bill creates new tasks which will require new staff. Much has been said about the extra £30 million to which my right hon. Friend referred in his opening speech. I find that a suspiciously round figure. I accept that it has been worked out according to a scientific formula, as my right hon. Friend said, but I should like know exactly how the calculation was done.
Many environmental health departments are understaffed and underfinanced. There is widespread belief in Delyn borough council that the EHD is the Cinderella of the council. The deputy chief environmental health officer has admitted that
"less than the ideal level of service is provided."
That is borne out by the fact that the inspection of food shops and factories occurs only every two years. In 1988, only half the premises which should have been inspected were inspected. It is important to increase the number of inspections.
Following the salmonella outbreak, Delyn decided to do that and to crack down on food premises, and the number of inspections will be raised from once every two years to eventually twice a year, although initially to once every nine months. That alone requires one extra member of staff. In other words, Delyn is having to increase its staff even before undertaking the tasks imposed by the Bill. That is a measure of the cost to environmental health departments if they are to fulfil their functions properly.
There are other important aspects of the Bill which I do not have time to cover because I am anxious to allow my hon. Friend the Member for Upminster (Sir N. Bonsor) to take part in the debate. I allowed myself seven minutes and I have one minute to go.
One final point I wish to raise is, who is in charge in the event of a food poisoning outbreak? A circular from the Department of Health says :
"The question whether a health authority or local authority should have overall lead responsibility for the prevention and control of infectious disease remains undecided".
That is appalling. We have had a similar confusing circular from the Welsh Office. My hon. Friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health should get together with my right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food and sort out who is in charge. It is now clear who should be in charge during the outbreak last July-August and the result was chaos, a lot of unnecessary mud-slinging and friction between the health authority and the borough council. This is a national issue and it must be resolved before the next major outbreak which, tragically, is bound to happen sooner or later.
9.15 pm
Sir Nicholas Bonsor (Upminster) : I am grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Delyn (Mr. Raffan) and to the hon. Member for Carmarthen (Mr. Williams) for speaking so briefly and giving me a chance to join in the debate. It has been said that anything worth saying can be said in four minutes, and I shall attempt to put that principle into practice.
I have an interest to declare and I hope that I have a slight knowledge of the subject because I am chairman of
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the Food Hygiene Bureau, a company which, as my right hon. Friend the Minister knows, is the largest food hygiene consultancy in the country. We advise people on standards of hygiene, train their staff and look after any emergencies that arise.I am deeply involved in the hygiene industry, and in that capacity, I warmly welcome the Bill. It covers adequately the need to tighten up hygiene regulations and I am sure that it will go a long way to prevent a recurrence of the food poisoning outbreaks of 1989. The latest available figures show that 21,843 cases were reported in the first nine months of last year, and that is only the tip of the iceberg. Many people who fall ill from food poisoning do not identify the subject of it or do not bother to report it.
There are two matters on which I should like to comment briefly. The first concerns the regulations. I have to confess to Ministers that I am concerned at the amount of power that they are taking to themselves in clauses 17 and 18 and schedule 1. It is a worry that future Governments will have such enormous powers to make rules, regulations and laws without returning to the House for approval and I am concerned about the provision in clause 18(1) whereby any Community obligation can be brought into effect in this country by way of such regulations. If I understand the position correctly, that will mean that a Community directive that would normally involve legislation in the House could bypass the House and go straight into the law of the land by means of ministerial regulation. That is not desirable, and I hope that the point can be further examined as the Bill proceeds through the House.
The other main issue on which almost every hon. Member who has spoken has touched is the irradiation of food. The first question is, "Is it safe?" I believe that it is 99.9 per cent. safe. There is still a query over the effects that pesticides and other chemicals that have clung to the food that is to be irradiated may suffer. There is certainly a possibility of both molecular and chemical change in those pesticides that could be harmful to humans who consume the food. But it is a minute risk, which I believe to be heavily outweighed by the benefits that irradiation can confer. I would name just two. For some foods, irradiation is a far better treatment than any other available. The treatment of spices is a case in point. Spices are normally dried outside in their country of origin and are heavily contaminated. At the moment, they are often treated with toxic chemicals that could have a harmful effect on the humans who consume them. Irradiation treatment will be very much safer than the practice that we follow at the moment for lack of an alternative.
Secondly, as has been mentioned, the treatment deals with salmonella and listeria. Given the fuss that the hon. Member for South Shields (Dr. Clark) rightly made about the dangers from those two sources of contamination--
Dr. David Clark indicated dissent.
Sir Nicholas Bonsor : Ah, well. It certainly came up.
I should have hoped for a greater welcome for the irradiation process. There is a real need to have the
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products labelled--a point that I raised in my question to my right hon. Friend the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. There are three other items that I wish to fire off so that they can be considered at a later stage. First, I note that tap water is not included in the Bill. Tap water, of course, is a major potential source of infestation. I know that it is being dealt with in the European Community by water directives. I know that we have many water regulations coming through. Perhaps that is why it has not been included here. Perhaps the Minister who is to reply would answer that point.Next there is the question of food temperature, which, rather to my surprise, has not been mentioned today. It is the key to safe food handling. The temperature of food at all stages of the handling process, from manufacture to consumption, is of critical interest and importance. In transit and in the case of chilled foods in supermarkets, in particular, there are real dangers that controls at present are not adequate. There is also the problem that most of the measuring instruments used are not sufficiently accurate for people to be able to ensure that the foods are being or have been stored at the proper temperature. I hope that better equipment will shortly be available to enable that to be done.
Again, charitable events have not been mentioned in our debate, although they were referred to in the other House. I am a little concerned that the marvellous work done by all our charitable workers might be affected by the fact that people face the possibility of a two-year prison sentence and an unlimited fine if they inadvertently give anybody food poisoning. While I accept that people who go to charitable events need protection, I wonder whether penalties in those cases should be rather less than the penalties for some of the offences that the Bill prescribes.
My final point concerns the training of environmental health officers. A sum of £30 million is being provided to help to deal with this new Bill. I believe that, if that goes direct to local authorities, it will be largely wasted. I do not think that the Government will be able to keep adequate control over the way in which it is spent. I would far rather see that money go towards provision for the training of more environmental health officers to a higher standard so that we can be sure that the Bill will be properly monitored.
In summary, it is a very good Bill and goes a long way towards meeting the needs of the times. Lord Gallacher, leading for the Opposition in the other place, said :
"It is a Bill which, with some improvements, can meet the needs of the times."--[ Official Report, House of Lords, 5 December 1989 ; Vol. 513, c. 761.]
I am glad that, largely I believe, hon. Members on all sides of the House agree on the value of and the need for this legislation. 9.22 pm
Mr. Ron Davies (Caerphilly) : The Opposition obviously recognise the expertise of the hon. Member for Upminster (Sir N. Bonsor) in this matter. It is appropriate that all hon. Members who have spoken in the debate have curtailed their speeches so as to allow the hon. Gentleman the opportunity to speak.
I must say briefly how pleased I am to see the hon. Member for Delyn (Mr. Raffan) in the Chamber today. I know that he has been hospitalised and has had to make his regular television appearances from his bed, so it is nice
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to see that he has recovered sufficiently to join us. The fact that he has a majority of only 1,200 and is likely to make rather fewer speeches in the House in future is another reason for us to welcome him today.The Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food opened the debate this evening with a 40-minute speech. Most of it was good stuff and quite relevant to the debate, but I have to tell him that a person who opens a debate, takes 40 minutes of House of Commons time and then leaves the Chamber while half a dozen of his hon. Friends and half a dozen Opposition Members make contributions to the debate is guilty of gross discourtesy not only to his hon. Friends and to Opposition Members but to the House itself.
It is a pity that the right hon. Gentleman did not have the courtesy of his hon. Friend the Member for Davyhulme (Mr. Churchill), who explained that he had a long-standing engagement and could not be present for the winding-up speeches. That is an honourable and acceptable course of action. It is an apology that we fully accept, as we have accepted apologies from other hon. Members who have spoken. It is a pity that the Minister cannot live up to any decent standards.
While I am dealing with the Minister, I draw his attention to one further matter. During the course of the debate, five of his hon. Friends had recourse to the civil service Box to consult civil servants about the content of their speeches. Every Member of this place knows that civil servants do not attend the Chamber for the purpose of advising Back Benchers on how to make political speeches. I am notifying the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food of what happened this evening and I leave the matter with him in the expectation that he will put his house in order. I warn him that if he does not do so, I shall refer the matter to the House authorities with the intention of making sure that it does not happen again. I turn to the Bill itself-- [Interruption.] If the hon. Member for Delyn and others wish to delay the House, I put it on record so that there is no misunderstanding, that there are other parts of the Bill's consideration that are to be dealt with this evening. If I have to face such barracking, I shall be happy to make sure that the House sits for the full time that has been allocated to it and that we arrange for Divisions to take place.
Mr. Davies : If the hon. Member for Delyn wishes to continue barracking, perhaps he should consult the Government Whip to ascertain whether that is an appropriate course of action for him to take.
Mr. Davies : We, the Opposition, have said that we welcome the Bill. We do not welcome it as enthusiastically, for example, as the hon. Member for Upminster. We have considerable reservations. As a tidying-up operation, there is much to commend it. The replacement of seven Acts with one is the kind of rationalisation that would be helpful across the huge body of statutory law. The Bill covers an area in which a legislative update is overdue. Changes in food technology and popular tastes have rendered existing legislation archaic in areas such as food manufacturing, preparation and retailing.
The Bill starts with a definition of food. It is carefully crafted to negotiate the difficult problem of foods which
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are alive, and live animals and fish which are not regarded as foods until they are dead. In another sense, the Bill ignores the basics. However welcome some of the measures that it contains may be, the Bill is not a substitute for a healthy food policy. The tightest of safeguards can ensure only that the consumer does not perish through poisoning. They do nothing to provide protection against death through malnutrition or diet-related illness.Food law should embrace the ways in which the health of the consumer can be improved as well as providing the means by which it can be protected. Instead, the Government's refusal to develop a healthy food policy on the eccentric ground that freedom of choice includes the right to obesity or starvation means that our national diet has reached an historic low point. If anyone doubts what I say, I refer him to the national food survey for 1988--the most recent year available--which contains the dismal observation that the nutritional value of food eaten in Britain's homes is the lowest ever recorded.
Mr. Ashby : Will the hon. Gentleman give way?
Mr. Davies : I am curtailing my speech to take account of the speeches made by the hon. Gentleman and his hon. Friends. I am sorry, but I must proceed. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will be selected to help consider the Bill in Committee, when we shall have the opportunity to examine these matters further.
The survey showed also, not surprisingly, that the diet of the poorest sections of society is considerably less healthy than that of the better- off. Partly as a consequence, Britain is in the shameful position of having a widening gap between the health status of the rich and that of the poor. The incidence of diet-related illness graphically confirms the divide. For example, tooth loss, which is clearly related to diet, is five times as common in socio-economic group 5 as in group 1. Chronic heart disease is twice as common in the lower socio-economic groups as in the higher. Body weight could hardly be more closely related to diet. The lowest groups show disproportionately high levels of obesity.
The Bill does nothing to address those problems. Ideally, an improved version of it would include a package of measures to enhance the nutritional as well as the hygienic quality of our food, but the Government's doctrinaire attitude to those matters, which is obviously shared by some of the Minister's hon. Friends--the let-them-eat-cake approach--prevents the Government from championing the idea that people should be encouraged as a matter of policy to enjoy a diet that is good for them.
I am not suggesting even a whiff of compulsion, but the Opposition think it sensible where possible to use the powers available to Government to promote healthy eating, rather than insisting that, if consumer ignorance results in unhealthy diets, that is the consumer's perogative. It would be heartening to think that that might be a bipartisan approach. It used to be, but not any longer.
Why, if it were the Government's intention to promote healthy diet, did they abolish, for example, nutrition standards for school meals? School meals were introduced for the very reason that the children of the least well-off were at risk from poor nutrition. For some children in my consituency and in those of many of my hon. Friends, they were the only nutritionally balanced regular meal. That was why my hon. Friend the Member for Stretford (Mr.
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Lloyd) tried to reintroduce nutrition standards in school meals, but his attempt failed in the teeth of Government opposition. Nutritional labelling clearly has a potentially important role to play in increasing the freedom of choice, and provision is made in the Bill for that. That freedom of choice is meaningful only where the consumer has the necessary information. Voluntary labelling is not the answer. Under the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food voluntary scheme introduced in 1987, assessed in a Consumers Association survey in May 1989, comprehensive information with which to make an informed choice was available on only 3.5 per cent. of the sample of more than 400 goods.By agreeing to a voluntary scheme for Europe, the Government have found themselves in the dilemma of how to encourage the maximum disclosure of information useful to the consumer without making that so onerous as to result in manufacturers refusing to label their products at all. The Government have resolved that problem to the complete satisfaction of the sugar lobby--substantial contributors to Tory party funds--by subsuming sugar content into the figure for carbohydrate, which also includes nutritionally beneficial starch, and removing the distinctions on labels between saturated and unsaturated fats.
If the consumer is left in ignorance about the levels of saturated fats and sugar, what is the point of the label? Those are the most important considerations and both are currently left out. The whole issue of improved nutrition labelling is entirely left out of the Bill. I am pleased to say that the hon. Memer for Leicestershire, North-West (Mr. Ashby) made that point in a useful and enlighted contribution to the debate.
On a similar theme, do the Government not recognise the substantial and growing market for foods grown without the use of artificial fertilisers and pesticides and animals which are raised and slaughtered in humane conditions? That was precisely the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Preston (Mrs. Wise).
As an advocate both of natural production methods and of animal welfare, I celebrate the growing interest in organic and extensive production, but where are the clauses in the Bill to ensure that only food which legitimately meets the claim "organic" or "humanely produced" is so labelled? Why is there nothing in the Bill to ensure that those of us who wish to avoid eating the products of animals slaughtered without stunning can do so by studying a label? That is a major defect in the Bill.
There is also an overwhelming case for the replacement of the sell-by labelling arrangement with a compulsory use-by system. The recent report of the Richmond committee on the microbial safety of food recommends exactly that. When the Government, who claim to be determined to follow scientific advice, receive scientific advice which they dislike they are happy to ignore it. Recommendation after recommendation of the Richmond committee has been rejected by the Government. Will the Minister guarantee that the regulations to be introduced under the Bill will implement that particular recommendation of the Richmond committee? Will he guarantee that those provisions will be compulsory and enforceable? At
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the moment, not only is the Bill silent on those important issues, but it is so restrictively drafted as to render detailed debate on the subject at risk of being ruled out of order.If free choice means informed choice--as it does--the Government's commitment must be called into question, to judge by their record of obscurantism in those and other examples.
Having considered some of the issues that the Bill fails to tackle, I shall consider the adequacy or otherwise or what it contains. The debate on registration and licensing is still unresolved. In Committee, hon. Members expressed views and recognised the strength of the argument for licensing as opposed to registration. Major uncertainties remain over enforcement, not to mention the vexed question of irradiation, which has been the subject of many good speeches today.
By rejecting expert advice from expert advisers--from practitioners and people who are responsible for operating the regulations--and not going for a system of licensing, the Government are choosing a reactive rather than a proactive approach to the protection of public health.
To a considerable extent, this is a choice between prophylaxis and cure. Whether they are the local government officers who will have to enforce the Bill when it is enacted or the doctors and public health specialists who will treat consumers whom the Bill fails to protect, practitioners unanimously favour prophylaxis. The Government, in their pursuit of the free market and by persistently championing producer rather than consumer interests, have opted for the reactive approach--for cure rather than prevention.
There is to be no provision in the Bill for the licensing of food premises, other than those premises involved in food irradiation. The Bill merely requires a food business to provide four weeks advance notice of its intention to open. That fact will be recorded on a register and that will be that--the food business will be in operation.
Clearly, under the system of registration as opposed to licensing, the local authority would benefit because it would be fulfilling its public protection role more successfully if it prevented the opening of sub- standard premises rather than seeking to close them down using the courts after the damage has been done, with all the expense that that involves for traders, consumers and local authorities. However, it is not only the local authority which benefits. The trader, who is advised before committing large sums of money, will be advised on what exactly will be required to ensure that the premises meet the necessary standard and will also benefit from that advice before he starts his operation.
The Richmond committee clearly reached the same conclusions because it said :
"in order adequately to protect the public health, there is considerable advantage in prior inspection and approval before a food business is opened or a process started".
The Government claim time after time to recognise and act on expert advice, but on this occasion, they have received expert advice which they dislike and they choose to ignore it. The Richmond committee clearly reached that conclusion.
The Government have opted for a system that no one has asked for--a four- week period of notice from a nascent food business, during which it is presumably hoped that the environmental health department will go along and pay a visit. That is neither one thing nor the other. There will be no obligation for an EHO to inspect
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