§ MR. COBBI beg to ask the President of the Local Government Board whether he is aware that on 25th May the Inspector of Nuisances reported to the Rugby Rural Sanitary Authority that he had seized on 20th May a quantity of meat unfit for human food deposited in a cart owned by Mr. Thomas White, butcher, of Willoughby, addressed to a meat salesman in the Metropolitan Market, and actually at the railway station, and that the meat was afterwards seen by the Medical Officer of Health 1380 and a Justice of the Peace, and was condemned and destroyed; whether the Medical Officer of Health repeatedly urged the authority to prosecute White, but that by a majority of one they declined to do so; whether White has twice previously been convicted before the Rugby Bench, and once before the Daventry Bench, for similar offences, and was sentenced to two terms of imprisonment of three months each, and on the last occasion fined £40; and whether he will make immediate inquiries of the Medical Officer of Health and the Inspector of Nuisances of the Rugby Rural Sanitary Authority and give directions that a prosecution shall take place?
§ THE PRESIDENT OF THE LOCAL GOVERNMENT BOARD (Mr. RITCHIE,) Tower Hamlets, St. George'sI have made inquiry, and am informed that the facts are substantially as stated in the question, and that, although the Sanitary Authority by a majority of one declined to prosecute White, that majority was occasioned by the report of a case at Burton Latimer, in Northamptonshire, which was commented upon by several of the members of the Sanitary Authority, and in which the conviction had been quashed on the ground that the meat had not been actually exposed or offered for sale, and by the absence of the clerk through illness, who, no doubt, could have explained that the case cited had no bearing on the one under consideration. I have no authority to give directions that a prosecution shall take place.