Farmers Weekly campaign win as food fraud hotline launched

Farmers Weekly’s food safety and fraud campaign, Meat: Our Expectations, has won a key victory this week, as a new 0800 food fraud hotline has been launched.

The free phone number – paid for by the Food Standards Agency (FSA) – will allow people working in the food industry to share their concerns, confidentially, about potential food crimes.

Industry has agreed to help promote or otherwise support this hotline within the food industry in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. The FSA will provide communications material in a range of languages to help them.

See also: Mass food fraud and safety scandal engulfs sector

The move comes in the wake of Farmers Weekly’s exclusive investigation into a meat processor – which cannot be named for legal reasons – that was carrying out industrial-scale food fraud and serious food safety breaches.

A free hotline to report such issues was one of our resulting campaign asks.

Tony Goodger, head of marketing and communications at the Association of Independent Meat Suppliers, said: “It’s good to see the FSA has acted and we urge them to now share details of individuals who are banned from working in the food industry with trusted trade associations such as ourselves

“It is to Farmers Weekly’s credit that they have been prepared to undertake first-rate investigative journalism to uncover long-term wrongdoing by a business in the processing sector, and to then call it out as a means of driving meaningful change to the FSA’s approach to dealing with food crime.”

The FSA is also looking at ways to strengthen information sharing arrangements between the third-party auditors used by food businesses to help prevent criminal activity – another key FW campaign ask.

Emily Miles, chief executive of the FSA, said: “The Farmers Weekly campaign identified a number of areas for potential change and we look forward to hearing more.

“The FSA is always interested in improvements that mean food businesses meet their legal responsibilities to provide safe and authentic food.”

All of the changes come as the FSA published a report that estimated food crime costs the UK economy up to £2bn a year, with the burden of these costs falling on individuals, business and government.

The estimated value of fraudulent food and drink in the UK is estimated to be between £296m and £1.48bn a year.