A billionaire American tourist, mesmerised by the green lawns around the ‘Bloody’ Tower of London, asks the groundsman how he could get the same quality at his Texas ranch. “Simple really, sir: clear and level the ground, lay the seed and water it.” “That’s all?” asked the Texan. “Then you roll it for a thousand years,” the Cockney quipped.
For a thousand years too, quality fish has been sold by wholesalers on the banks of the Thames. In 1272, the salted and fresh fish companies sank their differences and won a royal charter (and almost a monopoly) and the Fishmongers’ Company began its rise to fish power. The “Mistery of Fishmongers” ended up controlling which City markets could sell fish and ensuring “that none but sound fish was offered”.
Royal prisoners, waiting to have their heads chopped off in the Tower, would have eaten fish from mediaeval Byllynsgate, just a few hundred yards up river. That general market eventually got its own special fish building, and today the whole operation sits down-river at the modern Billingsgate site.
Because of those ancient rights, Billingsgate comes under the Fishmongers’ Company’s three inspectors, says Chris - as everyone refers to him. Turnover, by some 50 merchants on the site handling some 25,000 tonnes a year, is in excess of £200 million a year. Running costs come out of space rental and service charges.
Handling a global catch
Fish, chilled and live, comes literally from all over the world optcut - green mussels from New Zealand, value-added seafood from Vietnam, herring from the Baltic, tilapia from Africa. Bottled soups and smoked fish are on offer to the public alongside Norwegian farmed salmon competing with wild Alaskan product and pollock.
The massive growth of farmed product, and what Chris says has been a ‘huge shift’ into value-added production from East and West, has changed the dynamic in Billingsgate in recent years. “It is also in the centre of what is now one of the most cosmopolitan mix of people anywhere in the world”.
That means UK target markets and special demand such as for carp from China for the Chinese New Year, or at Christmas for the Jewish community and expanding east European population. The East End Bangladeshi community is also a highly sophisticated, big consumer of fish, he says.
Supermarkets, fishmongers and catering companies may buy direct from suppliers at source, but they very often come to Billingsgate for something special or to top up their own stock, he adds.
He has been 20 years in Billingsgate and his career has included spells in local authority health inspection, and consultancy in countries such as Romania. Now 53, he qualified as an environmental health officer (EHO) in 1975 when the profession was being pioneered by institutions such as his alma mater, Tottenham Technical College, founded in 1890.
At the core of any inspector’s work, he says, is good, old-fashioned hygiene – making sure people wash their hands and preserve the cold chain. There are hand wash basins at strategic points across the market. He happily dishes out answers to email questions, from people from half way round the world, on what disinfectant detergents they should use.
Hand & Nose
All market water is potable. There is a daily clean, and Mondays (when the market is closed) is big clean day. Then the cleaners “…do a proper disinfection of the drainage system”. Waste water from stalls and the market floor requires no special treatment and is handled by the regular sewage system. He can close the market down in a flash if there were a broad health problem, such as highly infectious viral haemorrhagic disease - but he has never had to do it.
On general testing he says: “Fish is a naturally safe product so there is no point in us sending basic fish off for analysis…All our inspection is still done organoleptically, using nose, hands and eyes, with the exception of value-added foods and high-risk shellfish. Fish are going to tell you when they’re off -- it’s as simple as that! With your eyes, your nose your touch…and a modicum of common sense and training, you are going to be able to determine good or bad quality”.
He is very much up-to-speed on research projects to build up a fish DNA database for practical use. But he says most of the fraud game is in the frozen blocks. Billingsgate is mainly whole fish or fillets, so it is easier to identify ‘passing off’ a low-cost product for a higher one.
On the advertising war over single being better than ‘double-frozen’, he believes that industrial blast freezers mean double freezing presents nothing untoward in terms of hygiene and quality. He says he, the expert, cannot spot the difference; which might be in flesh texture. “Any thawing or freezing is going to have a slight reduction in the quality of the product - it is marginal.”
Bureaucracy vs quality
The bad news for him is bureaucracy. He is passionate, in a very rational manner, that on-the-ground inspection is being sacrificed at the expense of entrails on the slab of bureaucratic futurology. He believes its growth is a real, practical threat to public health. “When I was an EHO working for a local authority, basically I was left to my own devices to get out there and do the inspections.” He says, like teachers and doctors today, inspectors are swamped with bureaucracy and forced to produce statistics of doubtful value for people like the Food Standards Agency.
“If you are spending 50% less time out there on the district, you are doing 50% less inspections”. He says that because of so-called efficiency drives, in every walk of life, workers have to produce statistics just to satisfy elected members, civil servants etc.. But, he asks, “Is the quality of the inspection as good as it was and are they really genuine [valuable statistics]?” Nor has computerisation improved quality; just increased the bureaucracy, he adds, saying he spends up to two hours a day answering emails. Before, people would telephone and were very much aware of their own time they were using up, he says.
One of his ripostes is running regular training courses for fish inspectors working in port health.
‘What I am trying to teach them is not only about different products and recognising different criteria. Also to get them to understand that some of the decisions they are making have got serious financial consequences for somebody, say, in a developing country. Where they pick up a slight minor labelling defect and go and detain £5,000 of product, they could put a whole company out of business. I try to get them to have a better understanding of the implications and consequences of their decisions.”
As for infractions in his own fishpond, he says he can prosecute people. But if there is bad product they seize it and take it off sale. “On a marketplace, you are going to get different qualities on a daily basis, because not everything is bought and sold on a given day. Also the products arriving here are of different qualities and standards, from aquaculture to wild, between an inshore boat at Ramsgate [90 minutes by road] and one sending product down from Scotland [maybe 10 hours]”.
“We tend to deal with most things in a fairly informal manner. Because we have been here ‘for ever’ the merchants may moan if we seize a product but they respect our decisions. We are an independent body, we have no axe to grind with anybody about any decision that we make. There is nothing for us to gain by saying to somebody ‘you can’t sell a product’.”
That independence is core. “I would suggest that if we were not here on a daily basis, standards would drop.” Human nature means that there will always be the odd one or two people who think they can get away with something. “At Billingsgate, they know that if we pick up bad product we are going to seize it. And a member of the public knows they have got a point to which they can take a complaint.”
Bad product is bad for the whole industry, he says. The “serious reper-cussion” is not that the public will complain or be put off returning to a particular fishmonger or supermarket - it is that they will then be put off any kind of fish altogether, saying: “Ugh! Fish, horrible! I don’t like it”. That is not the way to get customer loyalty and increase the already very low level of fish eating, or encourage people to choose fish on a restaurant menu, he says.
For producers who want to see wholesale prices for their product, the City of London separately offers a weekly round up of average Billingsgate prices on its website. But Chris advises caution; that they are very rough and ready prices, adding that perhaps the most consistent thing about their accuracy is their inconsistency.
His antidote to bureaucracy may be his clear belief in the international and free exchange of information on quality control. He says professional networking is important. As an active member of the Port Health Association, part of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, he has good links with UK ports and local authorities, and, as a Board Member of the International Association of Fish Inspectors, he connects with inspectors worldwide.
“We have lots of people come down here, looking to redevelop their markets or to import products. Some Russians were here recently looking to set up a market in Moscow. People pick your brains. I have drafted some guidelines [for importers] and I would rather people did it properly than have half their product condemned at the port because of some technicality”.
Fisherman’s friend
That is important for fishermen who are doing much more processing, packing and traceability labelling on board. He say the EU labelling regulations are working well but suggests the UK is lagging behind countries such as India, Vietnam, China etc.
“It has taken UK domestic companies a while to get on stream with this.” One reason for UK delays, he believes, is fear that competitors would spot the source on the label and bypass a merchant to go straight to the supplier. “That has produced a marked reluctance domes-tically to put the supplier on the box. Foreign producers probably have a contract or a long-standing relationship with the UK merchant and a lot more loyalty”, he suggests.
What about skippers dealing direct with the end user? “If you look around the whole of Europe, the whole road infrastructure, compared to 30 years ago, means it is now logistically easier to move product around,” so that has had a big impact on routes to the end market, he says.
“If you look only at fish from UK waters, there is a fair argument that Billingsgate would no longer exist,” he says. In fact merchants are now selling more variety from more places abroad. “On average, there are 140 species or fish or shellfish coming here from the four corners of the globe”.
Know your partners
The Chief Inspector bluntly says everyone in the business needs to find out how their apparently invisible partners work. “One of the major problems we’ve always had in the fishing industry is that no two sections have ever got together for the benefit of a third. Everybody’s only ever looked at their own self-interest. I think we have suffered because of that, as we don’t always land to the market what the market wants ”.
He knows how tough making time can be for the skipper who feels like a galley slave lashed to his boat. “Everybody’s got to make a living and these days, particularly with the fishermen, I’ve got every sympathy for them with their reduced quotas and massive overheads on their boats.”
Fishermen should make the effort to visit markets like Billingsgate. He recalls one famous fishermen’s federation leader being stunned on his first visit - despite a career spanning decades. “He had only ever heard basically that ‘Billingsgate is a dumping ground for all the ‘crap’ in the industry’. He went round and was not just amazed at the quality of the product but said to me: ‘This is better than what my members are landing in …..’”
Chris adds that “There is a lot of disinformation that goes round the industry and its put out by self-interest. Don’t get me wrong - it’s not just the fishermen. My merchants at Billingsgate - how many of those have ever gone out to look at their suppliers or their customers?”
If folk got out and met each other they would “appreciate…the problems they have got. Then they can work together to overcome some of the problems and produce a better quality product for the consumer”.
