Here we go again: all the signs of another scandal involving meat and food safety. The first stirrings were in January, and while the authorities seem to have kept the lid on it for the moment, it has the feel of previous crises over food supply that have erupted after initial rumblings. There is confusion about what’s actually happened, and arguments over whether rules have been broken. The food watchdog has been accused once again of being too heavy-handed as steaks have disappeared from high street menus. It’s a fairly safe bet that there is more to come. The difference this time is that the structures that were set up to protect the public after previous crises are crumbling.

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The Food Standards Agency was created in 2001 asa central regulator after a series of food and farming scandals, with a mission to put consumers’ interests first. It depends on a functioning partnership with local authorities, which remain responsible for much food testing, inspection and enforcement. But savage cuts to councils’ budgets have forced them to squeeze trading standards and environmental health teams so hard that many struggle to fulfil their statutory obligations around food.

The agency itself has proposed a major shake-up of the way it oversees food businesses. It wants to shift responsibility for inspection and the cost of it on to industry itself. Reducing the burden on business with light-touch regulation has become its mantra. Private assurance schemes will increasingly take over from government-employed inspectors, and businesses that are generally compliant are to be rewarded with fewer inspections. We seem to have forgotten that it was companies deemed to be low risk that were at the heart of food adulteration scandals involving horsemeat and illegal cancer-causing dye.

The FSA has been tight-lipped about the current problem, and so far we have few details about its exact nature. The little we have been told has been expressed in the inelegant jargon of the trade: “serious non-compliance issues around use-by dates and food safety management systems” in companies that few people have heard of.

Russell Hume, a large supplier of meat to pubs, restaurants and hotels was first. It had its cutting plants closed by the FSA in January and was told to withdraw all its products after an random unannounced audit by agency inspectors. The company was dispatching hundreds of tonnes of meat a week to many large customers, but it had no public face, so the embarrassment was felt by the big names who bought from it – especially JD Wetherspoon and Jamie Oliver’s Italian restaurants. The FSA has said it is still investigating a “serious and widespread” problem at the company. As Russell Hume collapsed into administration this week, it attacked the FSA for acting disproportionately, and said relabelling was industry-wide because the rules were not clear.

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The withdrawals spread: to DB Foods, a sister company of and supplier to Muscle Meats, and then to Fairfax Meadows, another giant supplier to the catering trade, with customers including Nando’s, and other high-profile hotel, restaurant and pub chains. All have said they take food safety very seriously and have cooperated with voluntary withdrawals. Wetherspoon’s had just switched a third of its supply away from Russell Hume to Fairfax Meadows, only to suffer a double withdrawal.

Now the Guardian has learned that another meat wholesaler has also voluntarily withdrawn some of its products – Midland Food Services was inspected after the Russell Hume investigation, and officers reported a mouse infestation. The withdrawal began on 9 February but the FSA kept quiet about it. The public has still not been told where it was exposed to this unhygienically produced meat, although the company says it was a few droppings rather than an infestation, that the problem is now solved, and that restrictions have been lifted. As officials look up and down the chain to see who has been sending what to whom, an ever-wider web of companies will be drawn in. Will we be told about these, or will their names be kept quiet too?

Instead of the transparency on which the FSA was founded, we have been given what have now become the usual reassurances from the regulator: no one known to be ill, let alone dead as a result, nothing much to share here.

Although we are in the dark about many aspects of the latest meat relabelling, we know from previous scandals what sort of concerns arise. Food safety depends on being able to trace meat right through the food chain, and on a series of rules about identifying the source of meat and when it was produced.

Procedures on use-by dates and relabelling are not merely nerdy technical points. They can be life-or-death matters. Read the FSA’s guidance on repacking stored meat, and you can see why. It is common practice in the meat industry to vacuum pack fresh meat once it is slaughtered and cut. Removing the oxygen prevents spoilage and can keep meat looking good for months. When you open the pack it deteriorates rapidly and can smell terrible for a while, but more importantly the potentially deadly bacterium Clostridium botulinum can grow even in a vac pac.

Because of this, regulations require that meat off the carcass is given a 10-day shelf life. If you unpack and repack it, you are supposed to apply the original use-by date unless you have cooked it or have other methods of control in place. But parts of the industry, the guidance says, give meat a rolling 10-day shelf life, a practice it condemns because it can add extra days or even weeks and months. Cases of botulism food poisoning are rare, but since it is potentially lethal these safety procedures are crucial. Deaths from fires caused by unsafe cladding seemed a remote risk too until, at Grenfell, they tragically weren’t.

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All meat must also be labelled with official health marks to make it possible to trace it back to the original licensed slaughterhouse and date of processing, so that consumers can be sure it is safe and is what it claims to be.

Journalists have repeatedly found hygiene and labelling concerns where auditors have seen none. Guardian investigations have reported such things in 2001, in 2014 and in 2017.

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Separate from these, we know from previous prosecutions that audits that tend to concentrate on paperwork and tick-boxes can be cheated. Previous official investigations have also revealed how extraordinarily easy it is to fake health marks and rewrite use-by dates and traceability notes. You just need a printer and you can churn out new ones with different dates or with marks hijacked from other factories and apply them to boxes of meat mixed with any old horse, undeclared offal or head meat.

Local authority sampling and testing of foods fell by a quarter in 2017. At the same time council public analyst laboratories that carry out these tests are disappearing, as their work for depleted trading standards teams dries up. These cuts may seem safe to make. They’re not. Will it take a serious outbreak of food-borne illness for the government to realise what we are losing? • Felicity Lawrence is a Guardian special correspondent and author of Not on the Label: What Really Goes into the Food on your Plate