Written question asked by Clive Betts (Labour) on Thursday, 14 May 2026, in the House of Commons. It was due for an answer on Wednesday, 20 May 2026 (named day). It was answered by Sharon Hodgson (Labour) on Wednesday, 20 May 2026 on behalf of the Department of Health and Social Care.

Food Poisoning

Question: To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many major food incidents have there been in each of the last 5 years and of those how many were meat related.

Answer

In responding to food and feed safety incidents and foodborne disease outbreaks, the Food Standards Agency (FSA) categorises its handling of incident responses at Routine or Non-routine levels.

Non-routine incident and outbreak responses are escalated where it is considered that their successful management requires levels of resources and authority beyond those available for routine incident handling.

In the calendar years 2021 to 2026, the FSA escalated three meat related incidents and outbreak responses to Non-routine status. This was from a total of 15 Non-routine incidents in that period. All three of these meat related incidents were escalated within the calendar year 2023. The following table shows the number of incidents/outbreak responses escalated to Non-routine status for the calendar years 2021 to 2026:

Calendar year	Number of incidents/outbreak responses escalated to Non-routine status
2021	2
2022	2
2023	5
2024	3
2025	2
2026	1
Total	15

Secondary information

Type: Written question
Reference: 1119
Session: 2026-27
Subjects: Food poisoning
Contains statistics: Yes
Link: View this Written question on www.parliament.uk

Food Poisoning

Secondary information

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