Food safety: the road to disaster

By Richard North - September 9, 2025

Looking at the Telegraph headline: “High streets flooded with illegal meat amid smuggling wave”, my first response was to mutter darkly to myself: “told you so!”, with the injection of some fairly coarse vituperation.

From there I moved to the website of the parliament committee whose report triggered the article to find its headline telling us: “Meat smuggling crisis risks major disease outbreak, warn MPs”.

Still in “told you so” mode, I had a look at the report proper, headed “Biosecurity at the border: Britain’s illegal meat crisis”, the third report of the session from the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Efra) Committee.

It takes the committee 52 pages to make their point, but the opening summary paints the picture with admirable clarity. “The spread of animal diseases in Europe in recent years”, it says, “has resulted in the collapse of domestic markets in some affected countries, trade restrictions, and stricter rules about what food you can bring into Great Britain for personal use”.

Warming to its theme, the committee then tells us that “alarming amounts of meat and dairy products are now being illegally imported to Great Britain for both personal consumption and sale”, noting that “criminal smuggling operations are largely responsible for this and are bringing in products of some of the greatest risk”.

Prohibited products of animal origin are entering through airports, sea ports and Eurotunnel in freight, parcels, personal baggage, and passenger vehicles. Meat is arriving in unsanitary conditions, often in the back of vans, stashed in plastic bags, suitcases and cardboard boxes.

This meat is finding its way to our high streets, farms, markets, restaurants and kitchen tables, demand-driven by the cost-of-living crisis as well as cultural preferences but, as one might expect, “we have no clear data showing the scale and nature of the illegal meat entering Great Britain”.

What struck me most about the report, though, was the low-key legacy media response. Apart from the Express, it seems that the Telegraph is the only national newspaper to publicise it, and then neither newspaper gives it much coverage.

Those of us with longer memories, though, will remember the food scares of late 1980s, running through into the 90s, taking in Edwina Currie’s “Salmonella in eggs”, the Listeria in cheese, and multiple others, only to be eclipsed by the long-running BSE scare, which had in 1996 apparently sane scientists predicting half-a-million deaths a year, the establishment of national euthanasia clinics and a panic response by France, blocking the Channel Tunnel with concrete.

For the many who were not even born then, it takes a real stretch of imagination, even to begin to understand the searing effect of these food scares, with the front-page headlines day after day that dominated the period.

There descended a national paranoia about what was safe to eat, while whole industries were crippled, with losses running into billions, while successive governments faced storms of criticism for failing to deal with the crises, international relations were strained and the EU response triggered national outrage.

We then had a hard lesson of the devastating effect that animal disease outbreaks can have, with the 2001 foot-and-mouth epidemic, which saw the [unnecessary] slaughter of millions of animals, more billions in cost, huge disruption with whole areas of the countryside closed down under effective martial law, and even a general election delayed.

We then got a short, sharp reminder of the power of the food scare with the 2013 horse meat scandal, although that had no significant (or any) public health implications, so it dies down pretty quickly with no long-lasting effects.

Since then, for over a decade, things have been pretty quiet on the scare front. There have been no major alarums hitting the headlines, despite the perturbations over Brexit and the uncertainties and confusion over food inspection at the borders.

Food safety as an issue has largely disappeared from public sight and an atmosphere of complacency has replaced the storms of 30 years ago. Even a recent official report, signalling 17 percent increases in both Salmonella and Campylobacter cases bringing them to the highest level for a decade, has had no discernible impact.

For sure, back in 1990 the Salmonella figures for England and Wales were peaking at 36,945 reported cases for the year, compared with 10,388 cases in 2024, but Campylobacter cases have more than doubled from a baseline of around 30,000 cases a year to 70,352 in 2024.

Some of us, however, argued that the higher incidence of Salmonellosis in the 1990s represented the higher awareness of the disease and the more intense surveillance, so the current baseline could very quickly show a reported increase, should there be greater public concern about food safety.

Of the current reasons for reduced surveillance, one must be the catastrophic fall in the number of qualified environmental health officers (EHOs) employed by local authorities. When I qualified in the early 1970s, there were over 10,000 of us yet the number has now dropped to around 3,000.

Furthermore, as local authorities struggle with funding their increased responsibilities, the number of people applying and graduating from environmental health degrees is said to be low.

Those that do graduate are not up to scratch; the quality of knowledge and experience is low. They don’t need to complete as much work experience in comparison to previous times.

Years ago (for instance, when I was training) students would be sent across to different cities to complete a varied list of responsibilities i.e., industrial areas for land contamination and air quality, with 200 hours practical work in a slaughterhouse for meat hygiene.

Furthermore, degree courses were rare. Mostly, they were sandwich courses, so students were directly employed, working on the district when not at college, shadowing qualified officers, rather then just visiting local authorities for “work experience”, where the authorities don’t have the time or resources to deal with them.

Gradually, almost imperceptibly we have seen a deterioration in the service, made worse by the fragmentation of public health services as meat hygiene responsibilities have been split between central and local government – with next to no co-ordination – and port health inspection in chaos.

Thus we have the Efra committee complaining that border officers are conducting far fewer seizures of animal products than in the years following the 2001 foot and mouth outbreak. In March 2005, the National Audit Office (NAO) reported that Customs was performing 15,800 seizures of animal products annually, six times the number conducted in 2024.

Despite this reduction, unprecedented volumes of illegal animal products are being seized at the border: 235 tonnes in 2024 from just 2,600 seizures, giving some indication of the scale of the problem.

Defra, the committee says. provides reassurance that “intelligence led checks”’ are being performed at the border but, as we have learned to our great costs, anything coming from Defra is invariably undistilled bullshit.

This, somewhat more diplomatically is confirmed by the committee, which observes that Defra’s “terminology” obscures the reality on the ground. The committee sees a limited and incomplete intelligence network, strained enforcement capability, and port facilities unsuitable for seizing significant volumes of potentially contaminated meat.

It says its members saw the extent of these issues first hand when they visited the Port of Dover. We are also concerned that instead of learning from frontline workers, Defra has allowed its relationship with one of the most strategically important port health authorities to deteriorate to the point of bitter disagreement and communication breakdown.

In the past, it was never the case that we relied on port inspections alone, with inland EHOs carrying out their routine inspections at slaughterhouses, cutting plants, wholesalers and processers, right down the chain to retailers and restaurants.

Now, the committee – without even being aware of how the system used to work – says responsibility for tackling illegal meat imports is divided across Government departments, enforcement agencies and local authorities.

It has found “no strategic approach coordinating efforts and no leadership figure spearheading operations”. Successive governments, it warns, have failed to design and deliver a response proportionate to the challenge. It is our view, it concludes, that the UK has avoided another major disease outbreak from illegally imported meat by luck rather than design.

But, as we found in the 1980s, luck eventually runs out. Behind the wrongly identified salmonella in eggs scare, there were real food safety issues, unaddressed by a system that was already failing. But now, we are warned, it is inestimably worse.

As with so many other spheres of public sector activity, we are marching down the road to disaster.