Defra secretary Owen Paterson is travelling to Brussels for a Summit on the horsemeat scandal, which erupted in the UK and Ireland in January, and has since widened to implicate businesses across Europe's meat processing and supermarket retail sectors.

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News of Paterson's trip to Brussels coincides with the latest development in the scandal within the UK. Following investigations into the prevalence of mislabelled horsemeat in products sold as beef, Food Standards Authority inspectors and police raided premises in Wales and West Yorkshire on Tuesday (12th February).

The plants, one an abattoir and the other a meat processing business, were raided after the Peter Boddy Slaughterhouse, Todmorden was suspected of having supplied Farmbox Meats in Aberystwyth with horsemeat, which would have then been sold as beef for use in kebabs and burgers. Both businesses have had their operations suspended pending an investigation.

Andrew Rhodes, FSA Director of Operations, commented on Tuesday, "I ordered an audit of all horse producing abattoirs in the UK after this issue first arose last month and I was shocked to uncover what appears to be a blatant misleading of consumers. I have suspended both plants immediately while our investigations continue."

Defra Secretary Paterson said, "This is absolutely shocking. It's totally unacceptable if any business in the UK is defrauding the public by passing off horsemeat as beef. I expect the full force of the law to be brought down on anyone involved in this kind of activity."

The Environment Secretary has ordered wide-reaching testing to be carried out on processed meats in the UK as soon possible, in order to build up a clearer picture of the situation. Nevertheless, Tuesday's raids, occurring as they did just days after politicians began to suggest the horsemeat debacle could be traced to fraudsters and 'organised crime' syndicates in Southern and Eastern Europe, shift the focus once more to the UK's food system.

Speaking yesterday, Professor Karel Williams of Manchester Business School and the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change contested the current dominant narrative on the scandal, which in Owen Paterson's words is that discoveries of processed 'beef' contaminated with horse and pig meat amounts to "fraud on the public, which appears to be conducted by a criminal conspiracy."

Professor Williams told Farming Online, "The official line is that horsemeat is not a food safety issue, we are the victims of mafia fraud and the supermarkets should test more. This is both naive and a distraction. The problem is long and constantly shifting adversarial supply chains, where processors are buying in on price and the delivery by 40 tonne chiller truck comes from somewhere different each week.

"The [horsemeat scare] is what academics call a 'normal accident'; inevitable sooner or later because it is inherent in system design. And it is unnecessary because we can have tight control of a short chain and no accidents if [we] change supermarket business models and take action for food security before we lose what's left of UK food production and processing."