I will try to fit a question in, but first I praise Mr Morton and Mr Anderson as the only two witnesses who have told us who should be on the board, while everyone else has ducked the question. I thank them very much for that.
On the public health levy, it is worth putting on record that it was given that name because it targeted the largest retailers selling both alcohol and tobacco.
I will not go back to the detail on labelling just now. I asked my previous question to get some reassurance that there will not be microdetail in labelling, and that the provision is more about food fraud. I think that people readily assume that, if they are paying for lamb and getting beef, that is just wrong. It is not a minor labelling infringement; it is fraud. Likewise, if a retailer is offered a deal for beef that is too good to be true, and the beef turns out to be horsemeat, because the latter is 70p a kilo while the former is £3.80 a kilo, there is a responsibility on the retailer to say something.
I take on board that you would have to follow up such an issue not only with the retailer but right through the food chain, and I am sure that the expertise exists to do that. I wanted to mop up some of those issues because I thought it was important to provide balance.
My question is on how all that fits in with the duty to report. If a retailer, or whoever it is in the food chain, gets a deal that is just too good to be true, and they know it is iffy and a bit dodgy, I would expect there to be a statutory obligation on that retailer to raise that with the authorities. Is there now a duty to report when it is believed that there could be an infringement? Some views on that would be welcome.
I do not know how widespread that is, but I praise the retail sector for its action. A representative from Tesco came before the committee the other week and said that, since the horsemeat scandal, there is much more transparency in the testing that Tesco does and in reporting the results.
Tesco is working in partnership with food standards experts and other large retailers on taking a more risk-based targeted approach to testing. There was a feeling that, before the horsemeat scandal, people sometimes tested to validate what they thought was safe. We need to build in the risk element and target products that it is more appropriate to test.
There are two aspects to my question on the duty to report. Do people see the duty as an important part of the bill with regard to everyone meeting their responsibilities? Is enough being done to provide transparency in testing by the large retailers? Is that better done voluntarily, or should we consider putting it on a statutory basis?
That is not a very brief final question, but it fits in well with previous questions.