Animal products (2019)
Request
The weight and quantity of food purchases of animal products (including meat, fish, poultry, milk, cheese and cream) for March 2019.
Response
The information held by the House of Commons is a list of food products (raw ingredients and finished products) split into broad categories, such as ‘Lamb', ‘Dairy', ‘Cheese', etc., and the details you have requested for the items in these categories are provided.
Please note that we are also aware that other food products purchased by the House of Commons may contain ingredients from animal sources. For example, some chocolate products may contain cows' milk. We do not specifically log or record if an item contains animal products, so we hope you understand that, considering the many hundreds of lines purchased by our Catering Service, it would take a significant amount of time to identify the source of every ingredient in every item purchased. The Freedom of Information Act 2000 only obliges us to spend up to £600 of tax payers' money to identify, locate and retrieve information for a request, which is the equivalent of 24 working hours. Therefore any request that required us to exceed this limit would be likely to be refused under section 12 of this Act. However, if you wish to be provided with information of a specific set of products (for example, which of our confectionery lines contain animal products), please let us know and we will try to assist.
Lastly, it may interest you to know that we publish a lot of information related to our catering services as transparency publications on our website. This contains details of our venues, tariffs, sourcing information, sample menus, etc.