Caerphilly County Borough Council has allayed food safety fears after the closure of Wales’ only publicly-run food testing laboratory.
Cardiff Council has announced the closure of Cardiff Scientific Services as part of a bid to save £48m this year. The facility is used by Caerphilly Council to test that food is fit for public consumption.
The move comes after last year’s scandal, when 17 beef products on sale in the UK were found to contain horsemeat.
Prof Hugh Pennington, an expert on bacteriology at the University of Aberdeen, told the BBC a lack of publicly-run laboratories could raise serious difficulties and mean councils will struggle to respond to similar crises.
He said: “Like horsemeat, where something comes out of the blue and suddenly there’s an enormous issue, the public want it resolved and you have to work out if there’s a public health threat.
“You have to work out what the scale of the problem is and you need some sort of central authority working for the public to do that.
“You can’t do that just by relying on outsourcing all of your testing.”
But a Caerphilly County Borough Council spokesman said public analysts were on-hand to deal with such issues.
He said: “The council’s Environmental Health and Trading Standards departments have public analysts, appointed by Cabinet, to undertake food sampling.
“In addition to Cardiff Scientific Services, the council has two other companies with several public analysts who are appointed to analyse any food samples taken.”
A spokeswoman for the Food Standard Agency in Wales said: “We noted the intent of Cardiff Council to close the scientific Services lab.
“The provision of testing facilities is an important aspect of food sampling and the work will still have to be done.
“The onus will still be on local authorities and those authorities who previously used the lab will have to have their samples studied at alternative laboratories.”
A Cardiff Council spokesman said: “Unfortunately there wasn’t a viable business plan for the facility, so a decision was made to remove the annual £200,000 subsidy as part of the council’s agreed 2014 budget.”
The Welsh Local Government Association blamed “drastic cuts being made to the local government budget in Wales”.