Year after the horse meat scandal, what has changed?

Millions of burgers, meatballs and pre-made meals were withdrawn from supermarket shelves.

Some school dinners had to be dumped.

And, figuratively speaking, there was mass demand for heads to roll.

Now 12 months on we have the chance to take stock.

There have been five reports commissioned by various Government departments, but what has changed?

First of all, if the righteously indignant in society were hoping for prosecutions, they will have to wait a little longer.

Despite the fact that several of the sources of the contiminated meat were immediately identified, there has not been a single prosecution.

And I cannot be alone in finding that to be quite staggering.

I am no fan of the corporate litigation society.

But there are times when prosecutions must be unavoidable ... and this must surely be one of them.

I am fortunate that burgers and pre-made meals do not form the tiniest proportion of my diet.

But if they did, would I be right in feeling safe in eating them.

By using the word “safe” I am not for a minute suggesting that horse meat is a killer.

What I am saying is that we have the right to know what we are eating and that when food packaging suggests that the only meat in a product is beef, that is the only meat that is in there.

I think that most of the abhorrence flying around 12 months ago was the moral objection to eating horse.

In other European countries it is widely eaten and enjoyed.

But it does not form a normal part in the meat-and-two-veg diet of the average Brit.

Andjudging by last year’s furore that does not look like changing any time in the near future.

For some families, the value meal end of the market is a simple fact of their economic life.

They have the right to be treated properly, and when they are not that transgressors have to be punished.