Embarrassment as some farms miss cage ban deadline

The NFU tried to up the pressure on food processors and retailers by publishing a list of those which have promised they will not use eggs from cages which do not meet the rules activated on January 1.

British farmers have been complaining for months at having had to spend £400m to upgrade, while rivals in some EU countries have not bothered. But just before the NFU went public with its list this week, Defra revealed that 30 British farms had missed the deadline too.

Both Defra and NFU insisted that the British defaults were all unintentional, caused by planning and building delays, and the small number of non-compliant farms would have caught up by the end of this month.

But the embarrassment was the first thing the Food & Drink Federation mentioned when asked why its members were not making the promises the NFU wanted. Spokesman Terry Jones said his federation had 350 members – “of different sizes and shapes” – and it was not possible to make a commitment on behalf of them all.

He said: “A lot have responded positively. Others will have contracts saying they will take EU eggs – which they would expect to be compliant with EU standards – and it is not a five-minute job to change the specifications. We still have 150,000 hens producing illegal eggs in this country, where we were assured there was no problem, and I am surprised the NFU has chosen this moment. This was a law for producers, after all. Nobody expected the onus to be on the customers.”

Asked what was happening to the non-compliant British eggs, Defra said it could guarantee they would not be sold in the Class A market – as whole stamped eggs – but could not do much to stop them going into food processing and catering, other than looking for voluntary co-operation from the industries.

The British Egg Industry Council said: “This is exactly the danger we have been pointing out and exactly why we are threatening to take Defra to court. We believe that it and similar ministries in Europe could and should be doing much more to enforce compliance.”

The council says food manufacturing, using liquid or powdered egg, is an open back door into the UK market for eggs from illegal cages.

Meanwhile, the NFU also had to deal with complaints that a big food processor, Northern Foods, and the catering group which runs Café Rouge, Strada and Bella Italia, had been unfairly named as failing to make the required pledge on eggs. By mid-week, Northern Foods had moved onto the Good Egg List at nfuonline.com and the list of alleged refuseniks had been removed from the site.