Illegal meat cutting operator sent to jail & decline in food hygiene standards
In our last petition update we mentioned that an illegal meat cutting operation (not registered and subject to official controls) was closed at a hand car washing premises in Wiltshire.
The news story in the link below indicates that the operator committed 39 food hygiene offences which he admitted in court.
These offences included lamb and beef being cut up in premises where there was engine oil and dog waste.
The man responsible for this was sentenced to 10 months in prison.
It was also reported that he made £150,000 in profit from this illegal activity and distribution across the country between January and November 2020.
It was estimated that 2.7 tonnes of unfit beef and lamb was destroyed due to this operation by Wiltshire council.
We will probably never know how much of this unfit meat was consumed or what illness may have been caused due to it.
Well done to Wiltshire council Environmental Health team for bringing this to a conclusion.
https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-wiltshire-59492147
It has also been reported recently that environment health officers and practitioners (EHOs & EHP’s) from local authorities are finding a decline in hygiene standards with their inspections of food businesses. Link to the story below.
This comes at a time when the Food Standards Agency (FSA) are planning reforming the way inspections are carried out both by local authorities EHOs & EHP’s, Meat Hygiene Inspectors and Vets.
In relation to local authority inspections, this will rely more on gathering information and results from the food businesses themselves and carrying out remote audits, based on the information the businesses supply (I believe marking their own work) rather than truly independent physical inspection at the food business premises.
Guess who the benefactors of this in the long term will be? The top ten supermarkets who according to the FSA estimates, have 95% of the total UK grocery sales. The Agency believe that they pose less risks than smaller businesses. This will presumably be rolled out to fast food chains and restaurants etc once the supermarkets are allowed to do this.
Yes, larger businesses do have better quality and safety management systems than smaller businesses but when they do have problems with food hygiene and foodborne outbreaks, because they sell more food their risk can be higher, but are generally better at avoiding bad publicity.
You may or may not be aware of the following.
On Monday 19th April 2021 Tesco the largest supermarket chain in the UK) a was fined £7.56 Million for selling a variety of food past its “use by” date in three stores in Birmingham between 2015-2017.
In 2020 a report was published by Public Health England (PHE) about an investigation into a national outbreak of STEC O157:H7 associated with frozen beef burgers, in the UK in 2017.
This outbreak was associated with Sainsbury’s (the second largest supermarket chain in the UK) and although the retailer and the FSA issued a product recall at that time, Eight out of 12 cases required hospitalisation and four developed Haemolytic Uraemic Syndrome(HUS). Link to the article below.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7522850/
Furthermore, the name of the supplier to Sainsbury’s has not been revealed
Although not a supermarket, in April this year a report was published that stated in 2020 there was an outbreak of E.coli O157 from imported cucumbers from a fast food restaurant chain. Link below.
https://www.ijidonline.com/article/S1201-9712%2821%2900312-X/fulltext?rss=yes
This research shows there were 36 confirmed cases of E.coli O157 from a product brought at a fast food chain that contained cucumber.
Of the 36 confirmed cases there were medical records for 33 people, 13 of whom required hospital treatment.
The name of the fast food restaurant, its product or the suppliers of the cucumbers were not revealed.
Cucumber is not the only ready to eat food that has caused problems recently.
On the 21st August this year the FSA stated in their news alerts that
They were “advising consumers not to eat several pork scratching products purchased since February, which have been linked to salmonella poisoning. There is believed to be have been 534 reported cases.
In June this year there were reported to be 102 cases in the UK of salmonella from imported Melons that were sold in at least one of the top ten supermarkets This was a global outbreak; however, the UK was the most affected in terms of reported cases.
In relation to Meat Hygiene Inspectors and Vets, the FSA are planning to let some meat inspections be carried out by slaughter house staff themselves rather than by Independent Meat Hygiene Inspectors and Vets.
This is quite surprising as in the FSA’s annual report for 2020/2021 published in November this year, it shows on page 41 that for meat plant audits that 58.4% were good and 40% were generally satisfactory, with 1.4% requiring improvement necessary and 0.0% requiring urgent improvement.
In relation to the 40% that were generally satisfactory, if you investigate these results, I am confident the majority of these would have had ONE major non-compliance at the initial time of the audit as previous results have shown. This means that legislative requirements were not being met at the start of the audit even if they were rectified during the audit.
It also shows on page 55 of the FSA’s annual report that the number of food Businesses published as awaiting inspection rose from under 20,000 to 61,200, a rise of 267% from March 2020. This I believe is mainly due to the Covid -19 pandemic when EHO’s and EHPs resources were often diverted elsewhere and prior to the pandemic there was a shortage of these professionals due to Local authority budget cuts and forward planning for training of new staff.
Thank you for your continued help and support and stay safe. Wishing you all a happy Christmas and New Year.