Examination of Witnesses (Questions 60-79)
MR KEVIN
HAWKINS AND
MR ALAN
BLACKLEDGE-SMITH
10 JUNE 2003
Q60 Chairman: Mr Hawkins, were you
in at the start of the CIWF evidence?
Mr Hawkins: No; I heard the last
quarter of an hour.
Q61 Chairman: Just to reiterate,
for completeness, the scope of the inquiry which is of course,
as you have read, to examine the state of poultry farming looking
particularly at the impact of new regulations on the industry
in its competitiveness and on animal welfare standards. Mr Hawkins,
you work for . . .?
Mr Hawkins: Safeway.
Q62 Chairman: In what capacity?
Mr Hawkins: I am Communications
Director for Safeway; I am also a Director of the British Retail
Consortium and, as it is tangentially relevant to this afternoon's
proceedings, I am a Member of the Meat and Livestock Commission,
so I am guilty on all counts!
Q63 Chairman: We are setting the
scene for the moment. Mr Alan Blackledge-Smith, you are here in
which capacity?
Mr Blackledge-Smith: I am the
Technical Controller at Safeway for meat, fish and poultry.
Q64 Chairman: Are you involved with
the BRC as well or not?
Mr Blackledge-Smith: No.
Q65 Chairman: We are moving as smoothly
as I can engineer from the point that has been made by Mr Stevenson
that consumers have to take on trust to a great extent the animal
welfare background to the chickens and eggs which they are buying
from the large retailers who do control of the great majority
of the market and the BRC represents them and you have said, addressing
this to Mr Hawkins, that retailers will only source poultry products
that meet their own specifications. Is there much variation in
expectation and specification from the retailers within the BRC
membership?
Mr Hawkins: Generally speaking,
probably not. I think that you have the big six retailers: ourselves,
Tesco, Sainsbury, Asda, Morrisons and Somerfield—I guess
that they are all pretty much of a muchness. Then of course you
have the smaller more specialist retailers like the M&S food
business and like Waitrose who may require slightly higher specifications
for some of their grades because they charge a slightly higher
price; they are more of a premium-price operation.
Q66 Chairman: And you do compare
notes? As the BRC, do you collect information from within your
membership as to the variability of the standards of expectation?
Mr Hawkins: As these are competitive
issues or shared inter-competitive issues, I do not think the
BRC itself collects commercial criteria but what it does do of
course is to have a BRC technical standard which all of us insist
our suppliers adhere to and that covers things like hygiene, basic
welfare and so on. Above and beyond that, we have things like
the ACP scheme, which I am sure you have heard about already,
and of course our individual retailer codes of practice which
go beyond the ACP scheme in some respects. Certainly I am now
speaking for the Safeway code.
Q67 Chairman: Does the same standard
apply to poultry which is sold fresh as opposed to poultry meat
being used as an ingredient for prepared products?
Mr Hawkins: In the case of poultry
meat sold as part of a higher value-added product like a ready-meal
or a convenience food of course, those are supplied either by
the manufacturers under their own brand, in which case they specify
whatever they want. If it is our own brand, then of course we
have more control over it. Generally speaking, I would say that
the requirements are broadly comparable. Would you agree with
that, Alan?
Mr Blackledge-Smith: Yes.
Q68 Chairman: You make a big thing
in pitching for the trust of consumers—and I am now talking
as a retail industry—about independent auditing of standards
and presumably your inspectors do not let the suppliers know weeks
in advance before they turn up at their barns or their intensive
production units, but how frequently—and I will turn the
question specifically to Safeway in a moment—do you inspect
farms and processors in the UK?
Mr Hawkins: There are independent
teams or agencies who do inspections. ACP, for example, have their
own team of inspectors and there are independent auditors and
of course independence is important because it establishes our
credibility.
Q69 Chairman: How frequently do they
go to look at the standards in place?
Mr Hawkins: Our code of practice
aims for once a year, that is once a year to be audited directly
by Safeway technical staff and that is on top of whatever independent
auditors may also do. Clearly, it is more difficult when you are
talking about a site in Thailand or Brazil but, even there, we
would expect to visit them unannounced at least once every two
years.
Q70 Chairman: How rigorous is the
action taken by your member and let us say to you, Mr Blackledge-Smith,
if you or your independent auditors or their agents do find breaches
in relation to minimum standards expected?
Mr Blackledge-Smith: It obviously
depends on what the breach might be but the ultimate criteria
would be delist the source of supply.
Q71 Chairman: Have Safeway done that
in recent times?
Mr Blackledge-Smith: In November,
we de-listed a source of supply which has not been reinstated.
Q72 Chairman: Was that a small-scale
supplier or a medium one?
Mr Blackledge-Smith: It was quite
a large-scale supplier.
Q73 Chairman: Had that organisation
been given a warning in the past or was it an immediate cessation?
Mr Blackledge-Smith: It was a
first-time visit in fact as part of another group and it did not
meet the standards that we required, so it was not taken on board.
Q74 Chairman: How did you publicise
to the wider community of suppliers and would-be suppliers that
that is what you had done?
Mr Blackledge-Smith: We do not
deal with that many suppliers; we have quite a small supply base
in fact and it is just a known fact that that was the reason.
Q75 Chairman: I was not expecting
you to put on the noticeboard that XYZ Limited no longer supplied
Safeway, but how did you actually let the world of suppliers know
that you did take these things seriously?
Mr Blackledge-Smith: I think because
of, shall we say, the smallness of the industry, it does not take
an awful lot of broadcasting for that information to become known
around the industry. It is quite a small grapevine, I would suggest.
Q76 Chairman: So there is a broiler
telegraph almost?
Mr Blackledge-Smith: I would say
there is a very good broiler telegraph, yes.
Q77 Diana Organ: You have said that
Safeway only sources product that meets their own specification
and that often your codes go beyond the ACP standards, but you
have also said to us that the BRC is heavily involved in working
with poultry producers and poultry product suppliers to develop
and implement assurance schemes to establish production and processing
standards for retailer own-brand products. That does not sit together
because, if you are setting your own specification and they are
different or go beyond the ACP or other quality or farm assurance
schemes, why do you need farm assurance schemes anyway because
you take more notice of your own specification?
Mr Hawkins: Alan will comment
on that but you must bear in mind that there is a broad spread
of membership in the BRC, some larger retailers, some smaller
retailers, and of course you also have a number of food service
companies in membership as well. Therefore, while the big three
or four retailers may all have their codes of practice and one
or two of the smaller ones, not everybody does and therefore it
is important that the BRC tries to establish a common standard
throughout the retail sector and then of course that leaves people
like ourselves free to improve on those standards as and when
we can. It is not a matter of following a completely different
code. For example, the ACP scheme does not formally prohibit the
use of antibiotic growth promoters but the Safeway code does.
The Safeway code is much stronger on the need for suppliers to
produce documentation, so that if any of their practices are challenged
by an auditor, they are able to show or not show as the case may
be, by the provision of documentary evidence that they have adhered
to that standard.
Q78 Chairman: You have led from BRC
to Safeway to cite some things which Safeway does which you are
suggesting is higher than the—
Mr Hawkins: In certain respects.
Q79 Diana Organ: I was interested
in your codes—and let us take you with your Safeway's hat
on now—and I ask you whether you would have a different
set of specification for British product to that for, say, Brazilian
and Thailand product?
Mr Hawkins: Not in terms of quality,
no. Do you want to comment on that, Alan?
Mr Blackledge-Smith: I have recently
filled in a questionnaire which asked the very same question as
to what the wording was in our documents that matched UK and foreign
production. We only have one standard and one audit process regardless
of whether it is the UK, Thailand or Brazil.
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