Poultry Meat (Hygiene Regulations) (Hansard, 7 July 1976)

§ Mr. Strang

My right hon. Friend did not write to the association after its representatives had met officials of my Department on 13th May. He did, however, write to my hon. Friend the Member for South Shields (Mr. Blenkinsop) after a meeting on 25th May with him and other vice-presidents of the association. With the agreement of the hon. Member for South Shields I set out the text of my right hon. Friend's letter, which is as followsArthur Blenkinsop, Esq, MP, House of Commons, London SW1A 0AA. 9th June 1976 Thank you for your letter of 26th May following the meeting we had on 25th May about the rôle of the Environmental Health Officer under the Regulations we are proposing to make to implement the EEC poultry meat directives. I too am sorry that so few of your fellow Vice-Presidents of the Environmental Health Officers' Association were able to join us for the meeting. I can confirm a number of points made at the meeting which you found reassuring. First, in our proposed poultry meat Regulations we shall make explicit provision to give effect to the agreement we won in Brussels that, for purposes of home market trade, where poultry meat is cut up or stored in premises which are not part of a slaughterhouse veterinary supervision will not be obligatory and that the task may be assigned to "a suitably qualified officer of a local authority"; the latter term will be defined to mean a person holding one of the qualifications accepted as valid for the Environmental Health Officer. Second, in a guidance circular to local authorities we will make it clear that an official veterinary surgeon employed by them for the purposes of the Regulations will normally be a member of the Environmental Health Department of the local authority and will utilise the support services of that Department. You will, of course, appreciate that this must be advice and not a direction to local authorities. You also expressed concern about the effect of the poultry meat decisions in the wider 572W context of food hygiene. So far as red meat slaughterhouses are concerned, we are already committed to veterinary responsibility in the export context. For the home market, we have a Swann Committee recommendation that there should be veterinary responsibility. We have had a lot of representation on this and many other recommendations of the Committee. We have not yet reached decisions and I cannot commit myself one way or the other. Outside the slaughterhouse, I can be a good deal more definite. Where, in the field of meat based products, veterinary responsibility is required for export puropses, we shall have to go on providing it but for home market purposes we certainly do not envisage an extension of veterinary requirements and, as I am sure you know, David Owen gave a categorical answer to a written question on this subject on 24th May. In short, the members of the Association can be assured that the poultry meat Regulations are not, as some of them fear, the visible part of a large wedge designed to prise general food hygiene from their responsibility or to bring about the setting up of a local authority veterinary organisation independent of local authority Environmental Health Departments. Frederick Peart.