The celebrated family cheese firm, the food safety quango and a £1million court battle that will make your blood boil
EVERY day Selina Cairns makes the short trip from her farmhouse to the nearby huddle of traditional outbuildings. Within the thick stone walls sit row upon row of slowly maturing cheese wheels, whose creamy nuttiness and blue-veined tang have become prized by aficionados since they were first made 35 years ago.
The maturation rooms packed floor-to-ceiling with these intense and aromatic cloth-covered roundels are the focus of her working life, but they are also a vivid reminder of the nightmare battle she has been waging against a government food safety watchdog she feels is hell-bent on putting her artisan cheesemaking company out of business.
Her voice betrays her exhaustion as she says: ‘I feel like I’ve been on a bit of a rollercoaster and was unable to get off. But I also don’t see why I should have my name go down in history as having caused this outbreak when I didn’t. And my dad has been driving this and if he wasn’t about, then probably I would have given up at the end of 2016. I would probably have been better off financially as well.’
She is referring, of course, to the investigation into a serious outbreak of E.coli poisoning in July 2016 which would pin the blame on one of the unpasteurised cheeses made at the family farm, near Carnwath, in Lanarkshire’s Upper Clyde valley. Furthermore, her father is Humphrey Errington, one of Britain’s leading cheesemakers, who knew that being linked to an outbreak of food poisoning had the potential to spell disaster. In 1995, he had faced a charge that one of his socalled ‘raw milk’ cheeses, Lanark Blue, was contaminated with listeria and 44 batches worth £60,000 should be destroyed. Then, he had fought back in the courts and won.
This time it would prove so much worse. Food Standards Scotland (FSS), which takes charge of all cases of food poisoning, issued a food alert to local authorities, warning them to ensure that all cheeses produced at the farm were withdrawn from sale. An incident management team, led by Syed Ahmed, a clinical director at Health Protection Scotland, part of the NHS, was set up. Officials from South Lanarkshire Council were sent to inspect the premises. On July 29, Dr Ahmed appeared on television to claim that ‘the vast majority’ of those who had fallen ill had eaten Dunsyre Blue.
Within six weeks, news broke that the E.coli outbreak had not only affected 20 people but had led to the death of a three-year-old girl. Errington Cheese Ltd’s Dunsyre Blue was named as ‘the likely source’ of the outbreak.
FOR the Erringtons, the accusation that their cheese was responsible for killing a young child was horrifying, particularly as they believe their hygiene, production and maturation systems were beyond reproach. The claim had to be challenged, not simply for the sake of their reputation and to recover the cheese impounded by council inspectors but also to ensure the true cause of the poisoning was identified.
Fast forward two years and the Erringtons have prevailed after another bruising and highly public court battle, in which a sheriff cleared them of breaching food safety laws.
Sheriff Robert Weir refused a council application, backed by FSS, to destroy the company’s entire stock of cheeses, including its Corra Linn and Lanark Blue varieties which are made using raw, or unpasteurised, ewe’s milk from their flock of 400 Lacaune sheep.
Hamilton Sheriff Court heard that inspectors from South Lanarkshire Council visited the Errington farm more than 50 times over 18 months but found no evidence of contamination or hygiene failures, and the sheriff rejected the claim that it failed to achieve safety standards. He noted that no outbreak of food poisoning has ever been linked to sheep’s milk cheese.
In a 254-page ruling, Sheriff Weir said four batches of cheeses made with raw milk – one Lanark Blue and three Corra Linn – should be destroyed as a precaution as they contained levels of STECs (shiga toxin organism – the poisonous version of E.coli). But he also acknowledged that eating the cheese was unlikely to be injurious to health and the numbers of bacteria found were ‘vanishingly small’. Furthermore, he stated, there was ‘no justification’ for condemning all 83 batches of Lanark Blue and 70 batches of Corra Linn. In other words, Errington cheese is safe to eat.
While the 2016 outbreak involving Dunsyre Blue did not form part of the case, the Crown Office has already ruled out any criminal proceedings because of a lack of evidence linking the cheese to the death and officials have ruled out a fatal accident inquiry.
South Lanarkshire Council has said it will ‘fully comply’ with the sheriff’s order and it is expected to foot a sizeable chunk of the Erringtons’ near-£500,000 compensation bill for court costs, lost production and lost cheese.
But Ross Finnie, FSS chairman and a former Scottish environment minister, said he was ‘disappointed’ the sheriff did not rule that all the sheep’s milk cheeses should be destroyed.
On the face of it, the Erringtons had won, but it has scarcely felt like a victory. They have been forced to lay off all ten of their loyal staff – the last two left in the summer – after crippling legal costs left them struggling to pay their wages.
The cost to the taxpayer of this two-year struggle has been no less significant. Figures released under freedom of information laws show that the council has accrued a bill of £556,037 fighting the case, including solicitor fees of £229,140.50 and another £227,000 for an advocate. The council has also paid out £77,747 in additional legal fees as well as £22,149 to safely store the seized cheese.
The Erringtons’ anger remains firmly targeted at the FSS, a national agency with far-reaching powers, which they suspect of running a private agenda to rid Scotland of raw milk cheese producers over unfounded fears that the manufacturing process is inherently unsafe.
More than anything, the family are desperate to clear their name of the stain inflicted by the events of 2016. To that end, Mrs Cairns said she would be consulting lawyers about pressing for a reexamination of the E.coli 0157 outbreak investigation.
She said: ‘It took us 30 years to build up what was just a small business at the farm and it’s never as if we wanted to be massive, we just wanted to make something sustainable and good, to produce a nice safe cheese that people would enjoy eating.
‘One of my issues is that FSS have still got the outbreak report on its website which states that Dunsyre Blue was the cause of the big outbreak in 2016, so we obviously want to try and deal with that somehow and get it reinvestigated.
‘It was written without addressing my concerns about it or those of our experts, so it is something we hope to challenge in some way because it’s upsetting essentially being accused of killing a child when I genuinely do not believe that we did. I believe that our cheese was made safely and sometimes you’ve just got to stand up for what you believe in.
‘I believe they have an agenda to put raw milk cheese producers in Scotland out of business because they think it is dangerous.’
HER father has described the firm’s treatment at the hands of the FSS as ‘Kafkaesque’. He said: ‘It’s wicked, frankly. All they wanted to do was close us.’
Now 74, Mr Errington knows what it is like to lose a child, his daughter Ruth having passed away at the tragically young age of 29. He should be winding down in life but is raising his grandchildren with his second wife Sheena. He handed over the day-to-day running of the business he started as a tiny artisan cheese producer in
1983 to Mrs Cairns, his eldest daughter, and her husband Andrew several years back, but all three remain vocal champions of raw milk cheese. ‘We still have issues with FSS and how they regulate cheesemaking in Scotland because they have produced various different guidelines more or less making it impossible to produce it, which is obviously their intention,’ said Mrs Cairns.
‘We are hoping that, following the court judgment, they relook at how they regulate and treat us, because there’s only five or six raw milk cheese manufacturers left in Scotland and we are feeling just a bit battered.
‘You would have thought that, rather than trying to ban raw milk cheese from Scotland and importing it from France and other European countries where we have no control over the hygiene and production methods, the authorities would want to concentrate on helping us and to champion our great Scottish products.’
From the outset, FSS has argued that its only consideration has been public safety, but its hostile and secretive approach has drawn criticism from experts. Even now, details of how many people ate the cheeses are sketchy, while the microbiological evidence at the heart of the case was far from clear-cut and has been contested by scientists as respected as Professor Hugh Pennington, one of the country’s leading microbiologists.
Although the professor identified the particular strain of E.coli that had caused the outbreak, he could find no microbiological evidence to link Errington Cheese with it. ‘I have seen the results of many microbiological tests on numerous samples of Dunsyre Blue cheese,’ he said. ‘None were positive for this organism.’
In July, a damning report into the 2016 outbreak by an expert in the spread of diseases concluded that the incident management team (IMT) sent in by FSS had conducted a flawed inquiry, which may have missed the real source of the outbreak.
The report, compiled by Norman Noah, one of the UK’s leading epidemiologists, accused the IMT of being ‘determined to prove at all costs’ that Dunsyre Blue was to blame. Professor Noah said the cheese was likely to have been contaminated by other foods which were never tested, meaning that public health may still be at risk.
Professor Noah wrote: ‘In my view... the IMT were convinced early in the investigation that there had been internal contamination of the cheese... It seems to me that their attitude was to prove the hypothesis at all costs rather than keep an open mind.’
Professor Noah looked at how the IMT examined two separate outbreaks, in July 2016 and September that year, which affected a group of children.
In both cases, the IMT said Dunsyre Blue was the likely cause but the Noah report said no ‘biologically plausible’ evidence was produced to link the two and the children may not have eaten the cheese at all.
He said there was no attempt to investigate other foods served to the children, the kitchen used or the food supplier in the second outbreak. The child who died in the first outbreak was alleged to have had a blue cheese omelette, but this was not confirmed and no further information was supplied by the IMT. Two of the cases denied having eaten any blue cheese.
Although other foods, such as game and raw beef, were also transported along with the cheese, these were not tested; nor was the vehicle in which they were delivered, the report said. ‘It does not appear it was ever considered that the contamination could have occurred within [the premises where the food was eaten] or during transport of the cheese,’ it stated.
Professor Noah suggested that, if the cheese had been infected during production, ‘many more cases would have been expected’ and he said he was ‘firmly of the opinion that, if the cheese was the cause of this outbreak, contamination was on the surface and not within it’.
Others have echoed Professor Noah’s concerns.
Brian Whittle, Conservative MSP for South Scotland, acknowledged FSS had a duty to investigate Errington Cheese after the girl’s death but said: ‘There comes a point where you have to ask, “Is this the only line of inquiry?” If this is not the source of the outbreak, where is the source?
‘Looking at the evidence, [FSS] has been overly heavy-handed. [They] are going to have to look at their procedures. They have the duty to investigate but not to the exclusion of everything else.
‘There has definitely been a systemic failure here.’
THE FSS says it has yet to see a copy of Professor Noah’s report and told the Daily Mail it would not be commenting further on the case. However, it stood by its conclusion that Dunsyre Blue was the likely source for the 2016 outbreak, arguing that Hamilton Sheriff Court ‘did not have the opportunity to review the large body of evidence considered by the IMT during the outbreak’ as it did not form part of the case.
It insisted its investigations were ‘extensive and exhaustive’ and that an independent review by government researchers in New Zealand found the agency’s handling of the outbreak inquiry ‘reasonable and proportionate in regard to protecting public health’.
Such language is redolent of the line adopted by Geoff Ogle, FSS’s £105,000-a-year chief executive, who has scoffed at the notion of a secret crusade against Scotland’s raw milk cheese producers.
In a letter to The Times last year, he wrote: ‘Is there a hidden agenda against cheese made from unpasteurised milk, artisan producers or Errington Cheese? No there isn’t. Food Standards Scotland took a proportionate, evidence-based approach. Our decisions were taken to protect public health.’
Mrs Cairns remains sceptical but her primary focus is keeping her business afloat: ‘I have never stopped producing our cheeses, but we have lost about a year’s worth of production.
‘I wasn’t making Dunsyre Blue because I didn’t have a suitable milk supplier and I wanted resolution from the sheriff court on the legality of making it.
‘The sheriff has made his judgment clearly in our favour and I have now found a new supplier, so hopefully Dunsyre Blue will be back on the menu soon.’
Two years after the outbreak, then, its cause remains open to question, which Mrs Cairns for one finds deeply troubling. ‘We know it wasn’t our cheese, which begs the question: what did cause it? And if we can’t answer that, then we are all still at risk.’