Meat Hygiene Policy Forum

16TH MEETING OF THE MEAT HYGIENE POLICY FORUM
Alex Simmons has moved on to Defra so it was Peter Hewson who chaired this meeting.
There were no matters arising and the action points were noted.

New Structure of Meat Hygiene and Veterinary Division and TSE Division.
The latter includes research and has a role to attempt fundamental change to regulations to become more proportionate based.

Reports from Policy Development Working Groups:
Poultry Meat Working Group report was presented by Jeremy Hall. He started by covering issues common to both white and red meat.

Age of Minced Meat was his first point and although an agenda item later he reported that the legislation was bad and that the square mark proposal (see below) would not gain acceptance from the major multiples.

JH reported that industry was concerned about its ability to meet micro bacteria test criteria. He felt that Carcase Decontamination was being caught up in EU politics. He added that he did not think that tighter campylobacter limits could not be met. Steam pasteurisation was difficult for the poultry industry and he appealed to FSA to help come up with alternative treatments.

Of the Meat Industry Guide JH felt that the editorial function was working fairly well but there was a need to get a handle on changes.

Meat Inspection: White Meat training is varied and research projects and industry consultation was required.

Risk Based Audits: The Working Groups would like systems that reduce duplication and credit given for quality assurance schemes.

Specifically on white meat the Working Group accepted that there was a significant risk from salmonella, especially with free range poultry. The industry would have trouble reducing campylobacter because they are unclear of the source and how it can be reduced. With Listeria the standard was less than 100 CFU while the product was on sale which effectively means zero when packed. It is questionable if this is a risk to public health, would be costly to deliver and believe that product from other Member States has higher counts than UK product.

Red Meat was presented by Jo Head. She rattled through topics without giving much detail. These included Bovis, Edible Co Products, Field lairages where holding numbers would be allocated to fields under local authority jurisdiction, Casualty Animals. It was said that guidance on Food Chain Information lacked transparency and there was concern that movements from Northern Ireland to the Republic had not been thought out. Jo said that new hygiene measures for slaughterhouses required to be more risk and more science based. Knife sterilisation was described as a “nonsense”. 82°C was hard and expensive to achieve. There was no scientific basis and Australian Meat Industry guidance suggested time and temperature could be used.

Of Assurance Schemes it was said that these are time consuming, troublesome and expensive yet no recognition was made of these. Some are more robust schemes than others and consideration would need to be given to the nature of the schemes but the desire was to minimise duplication and the number of audits.
Game Working Group Chairman, Tim Hoggarth was not present and no report was made. There were communication issues with all the Working Groups regards the speed of and extent of minute distribution.

FVO Follow-up Mission on Meat and Milk – October 2007
Milorad Radakovic said the FVO's follow-up mission to the UK on meat and milk took place from 8 to 19 October 2007. A total of 4 slaughterhouses, 7 cutting plants, 2 meat products/meat preparations plants, 2 minced meat plants and 1 wild game handling establishment under MHS or local authority control were visited in Great Britain.

The FVO's main conclusions were that overall, no major issues of concern were found.
However, in some plants shortcomings were noted with layout, structure, maintenance and general hygiene. There were also some establishments that have been approved despite not being able to demonstrate full compliance with basic requirements. Approval letters, in some cases, do not cover all activities carried out, for example, cold store and distribution centre activities.

Some concerns were expressed with regards to the OV's supervision of the performance of the meat inspection teams, and the risk based inspection/audit frequencies at establishment level – for example, in one case, visits to conditionally approved co-located cutting plants were limited to one audit every 5 months.

FSA has responded with comments on the draft report which will eventually be published at FSA has responded with comments on the draft report which will
eventually be published at this website.Â

Another, general review FVO mission to the UK will take place in March 2008. This will be mainly a desk based mission to clarify any outstanding issues from many previous missions. Defra will act as host with full FSA participation. No plant visits will take place.

H123 issues
Food Chain Information: Pigs/Sheep/Cattle:
Kenneth Clarke said derogation had brought about a phased introduction of FCI. Poultry in 2006, Pigs in 2008, Cattle and Sheep in 2010. KC said the introduction to the Pig sector since 01/01/08 had gone well. Guidance had been developed and distributed in 2007. MHS had operated a one month transitional period and implementation had gone well with no significant problems despite making an underestimation of the number of pigs going to slaughter through the livestock marts. BPEX had run a system for electronic submission of FCI.

A meeting had been held to discuss cattle FCI and it was felt that this should present few problems because of TSE and Bovine TB records. Cattle movements are already recorded on CTS and under Animal Health.

Sheep was a bigger problem and Norman Bagley called for derogation out of it since there is no effective method in terms of cost and risk.

EU Regulation – Post mortem inspection procedures for pigs
Milorad Radakovic explained Regulation (EC) No. 854/2004 prescribes specific post mortem inspection procedures for pig carcasses and offal. Traditional routine post mortem inspection requires the visual inspection of carcasses and offal. The Regulation also requires that, during inspection, precautions must be taken to ensure that contamination of the meat by procedures such as palpation, cutting or incision, is kept to the minimum.

The FSA intends to continue to work on the implementation of visual inspection of pigs in collaboration with all stakeholders. The next meeting with representatives of the Pig Industry and MHS is planned for late February /March with a view to pilot VIP in eligible abattoirs in May.

Update on National measures and the number of days between slaughter and the mincing of chilled meat:
Rosalind Glover reported that as part of its consultation on the Food Hygiene (Amendment) Regulations 2008, the Agency included a proposal for a national measure to disapply the requirements regarding the length of time between slaughter and the mincing of chilled, fresh meat. In consultation it was stated that these proposals could only proceed if they were acceptable to the European Commission and other Member States who we were consulting in parallel.

During the consultation the Commission raised concerns about the UK proposal as a result of which it was agreed that the proposal would be dropped. A meeting was held with Commission officials and it was suggested that the FSA could submit a more specific proposal to the Commission and Member States under the Technical Standards Directive. For this revised application, FSA need to set out specific 'technical' requirements for different species in given circumstances and 'adapt' rather than 'disapply' the legislative requirements in this area. An example might be to set a limit for mincing x days after slaughter of meat being marketed as “y-day matured beef”.

The national 'square' mark would have to be applied to this product, containing the letter 'N', the words United Kingdom (or UK) and the approval number of the establishment where the meat was minced and packaged, so it is clear that it cannot be traded with other Member States.

Industry was not in favour of the Square mark and the EU was not in favour of the proposals. It was felt that South American beef and New Zealand lamb probably fell foul of this regulation but it was being ignored.

UECBV did not seem to have support from the industry of other Member States. Kenneth Clark felt that he was a lone voice when he raised this issue at European level. It was agreed to try and get hard scientific evidence that the time regulation was unnecessary.

Publication of the Audit Reports:
Joanna Fullick explained that FSA would prefer not to be seen as reactive to FOI but rather be proactive in the supply of information about standards in slaughterhouses and cutting plants. On planning what parts of reports could be published FSA had concluded that the whole report could be sensitive because it could form part of enforcement against a Food Business Operator.

Following legal advice it is now suggested that the scores from each of the separate sections of the audit report that cover the key assessments would be reported and the overall score. None of the evidence sections or the corrective action report would be reported.
The next step is to devise the IT solution to deliver the desired information.

Research
Mary Howell outlined the FSA's research projects:-
These included:-
1. A detailed study of the prevalence of veterinary medicine residues (e.g. parasiticides) in 'skin-on' sheep feet Feb 08 – April 09
2. Quantitative microbiological risk assessment on Salmonella in Slaughter and Breeder Pigs. Jan 08 – June 09
3. Zoonosis Action Plan (ZAP) Salmonella monitoring scheme.
4. The microbiological Status of Wild and Farmed Venison Feb 08 – July 10
The latter is of most interest and the project will review the current literature and observe and record practices used for game production focusing on venison and pheasant within the UK industry. Sampling and recording approaches appropriate for all relevant species of deer carcasses will be proposed together with microbiological methods for detection and enumeration of relevant organisms for carcasses, faecal samples and raw products. Microbiological and other data will be collected to evaluate the factors affecting carcass microbiological quality and pathogen contamination levels and identify the factors affecting raw venison products microbiological quality and pathogen contamination levels. The information gathered will add to the evidence base for procedures based on HACCP principles in game meat production.

Advisory Body for the Delivery of Official Controls, including the Transformed MHS, the Control Body Pilot and Charging:
Peter Hewson explained that this had been set up but yet again how this group communicates with the MHPF members was seen to be lacking and requiring attention. Meets 02/04/08.

Future of the MHPF
Joanna Fullick said the Tierney Report suggested the abolition or redesign of the Meat Hygiene Policy Forum (MHPF) and the creation of the Advisory Body for the Delivery of Official Controls.

The Advisory Body had its first meeting in December 2007; a paper was presented and discussed. Of the discussion, the minutes of the Advisory Body meeting recorded that: “Members agreed that the MHPF provided a useful forum for stakeholders to keep in touch with policy development; there had also been some very useful discussions with the Red, White and Game sub-groups. The Advisory Body felt that the MHPF performed a useful function and that it would be inappropriate for them to decide on the future of the MHPF. This discussion was more appropriate to the MHPF itself. It was also suggested that Advisory Body members might attend the MHPF to provide feedback on the discussions of the Advisory Body and to bring issues raised by the MHPF back to the Advisory Body.”

Future of Meat Hygiene Policy Forum (MHPF
A decision was unanimously carried to retain the MHPF with one or two meetings a year, as a plenary forum to discuss the issues brought up by the Advisory Body and the sub-groups.

AOB:
DS Asked for an up date on Vertebral Column removal requirement for 24 to 30 month cattle. Chris Walding gave the background but reported that a meeting in Brussells on 19th February had been disappointing. There had been informal soundings made to speed up the process but even with the Italians and the Brits raising the issue at the SCOFCA meeting hopes of speeding up things had faded. The Environmental Committee meet w/c 25/02/08 but the matter is not on the agenda. The next meeting is not until March. The timescale we were told is still three months until the end of the “scrutiny” period on 21st April.

After that, publication in the European Journal would be required. This could take up to two weeks and thereafter it would take three working days for FSA to introduce the UK legislation. Drafts would be ready for Ministers foregoing the 21 day laying period.

Defra is downsizing. Page street office will close at the end of March and move to Smith Square with new telephone numbers.

Date of next meeting – 9 September 2008