Meat inspection costs changes under two-pronged attack

Two leading figures in the farming and food industries yesterday rounded on the Food Standards Agency at two separate industry events in Inverurie, Aberdeenshire.

Their ire was directed at FSA proposals to seek full recoupment of the cost of meat inspection at abattoirs which could mean a bill of 32 million to the UK meat industry with 2m of the cost being passed back to producers.

The proposals from the agency have already been condemned by the UK farmers' unions and a raft of meat industry organisations.

Opening Scotch Premier Meat's annual Christmas carcase show, MEP George Lyon said both the FSA and the British Cattle Movement Service needed to look at the efficiency and costs of their own organisations before imposing additional costs on hard-pressed farmers.

Meanwhile, two miles away, on the opening day of the Aberdeen Christmas Classic at Thainstone Centre, Paul Cheale of Essex-based Cheale Meats - the UK's largest cull cow slaughterer - claimed the FSA's meat hygiene service had been allowed to "balloon out of control... in a bureaucratic nightmare".

Lyon said wide-scale reform was needed to eliminate unnecessary bureaucracy and inefficiencies on both the FSA and BCMS.

"The industry should refuse to accept any cost sharing unless the UK government agrees to a wholesale shake-up of these bureaucratic and inefficient organisations," he said Lyon.

He called for the introduction of an electronic cattle traceability system to replace the current costly and inefficient paper driven system operated by BCMS and for the adoption of a risk-based approach to meat inspection with abattoirs being responsible for maintaining meat hygiene standards in their own plants.

"If they can operate an electronic traceability system for cattle in Australia with a staff of only 50, surely we can do it here," said Lyon. "We need a dramatically slimmed down independent hygiene service carrying out random inspections with powers to shut down plants failing to comply with the rules."

And he added: "It must be reform first and then we can discuss cost sharing. Otherwise, the Scottish beef industry will be saddled with huge extra costs and a costly bureaucracy which it can ill afford."

Cheale said his company's plant in Chelmsford, Essex, with a turnover of 50m - half of which is exported - faced an increase in meat inspection charges of 250,000 a year to 700,000 if the FSA proposals are accepted.

And he claimed he could arrange meat inspection in the plant for only 200,000 without in any way undermining food safety.

"The government should chuck out this old, inefficient and unworkable system and start afresh," he said.