The big cheese fightback
Hundreds gather to mark firm’s relaunch after bitter legal battle
‘It has cost me a lot of money’ ‘Selling a quarter of what we did’
THEY queued from 11am – hundreds of cheese enthusiasts snaking their way towards Humphrey Errington’s farm in the hope of a crumb of Dunsyre Blue here, a sniff of a Cora Linn there.
For Mr Errington, founder of Errington Cheese, the Sunday open day at his Lanark farm was the turning of a tide which had left him looking like public enemy number one.
The impressive turnout on a brisk October morning came as a huge relief for the businessman, after a horrific E.coli outbreak and two years of court battles threatened to close his business.
Mr Errington has spent hundreds of thousands of pounds fighting the authorities who claimed his cheeses were responsible for the bacterial outbreak, which killed a three-year-old girl and hospitalised 17 others in July 2016.
As curious members of the public and fellow cheese makers were treated to tours and sample sessions at the farm near Carnwath in the Upper Clyde Valley, Mr Errington triumphantly declared to visitors: ‘It’s back to business.’
The 73-year-old has always refuted that his cheese was responsible for the outbreak and he has since been vindicated in a court of law.
Sheriff Robert Weir ruled in July that Mr Errington did not breach safety standards and refused to agree with the local council’s request to condemn all the cheeses it had seized – 153 batches.
South Lanarkshire Council has said it will ‘fully comply’ with the sheriff’s order and it is expected to foot a sizeable chunk of Mr Errington’s £500,000 compensation bill for court costs, lost production and lost cheese.
Yesterday Mr Errington said: ‘We have been almost off the market for the last two years so we wanted to hold an open day to remind people we are still here and that we have been vindicated.
‘FSS [watchdog Food Standards Scotland] have a vendetta against raw milk cheese producers because they think it is dangerous, but that is not the case.
‘All they are doing is putting producers out of businesses by introducing stricter testing and making our businesses uneconomical, but raw milk cheese is still being imported from France.
‘It has been very tough and it has cost me a lot of money in legal fees and other expenses which means everything I had saved for my retirement is gone, but we have never given up.
‘We are also looking after my grandchildren following a family tragedy so we just want to get back to business.’
He disclosed yesterday that he has begun a fresh legal battle against the council to have the remaining four batches of cheese that had been confiscated from the farm returned.
Mr Errington took the council to court in January after it called for dozens of batches of two cheeses to be declared unfit for human consumption and destroyed in the wake of the a suspected E.coli outbreak at the farm.
FSS investigated, pointing the finger at Errington’s Dunsyre Blue cheese, which is made from unpasteurised milk.
The council seized batches of Lanark Blue and Corra Linn from the company farm.
A civil case at Hamilton Sheriff Court heard tests found bacteria in both cheeses, and council bosses asked for them to be labelled unsafe to eat under food safety laws.
However, Mr Errington said the council was wrong and branded the decision unfair.
Following an appeal, in July this year, Sheriff Weir agreed.
But in a 254-page ruling the sheriff did order the destruction of four batches made from raw milk as a precaution, one batch of Lanark Blue and three of Corra Linn.
He also acknowledged that eating the cheese was unlikely to be injurious to health and the numbers of bacteria found were ‘vanishingly small’ and ruled there was ‘no justification’ for condemning all 83 batches of Lanark Blue and 70 batches of Corra Linn.
To mark the win the family opened the farm to the public yesterday, giving the hundreds of visitors from as far away as Aberdeen and Cumbria free tours and tasting samples.
But Mr Errington said he has lodged a fresh Court of Session appeal to have the destruction of the final four batches being held overturned ‘on a matter of principle’.
Mr Errington said the cost and stress inflicted by heightened hygiene inspections, which he said totalled nearly 100 in two years, have taken their toll,
But the businessman said the effects of his most recent tussle could be long-lasting after he made 12 ‘local workers’ redundant when rising court costs meant the family could not pay their wages.
He added: ‘As it stands wholesalers won’t list our cheeses so restaurants and shops aren’t buying it. We need that to change because we are only selling a quarter of what we did before this happened.’
South Lanarkshire Council was unavailable for comment.