BRIDGWATER and West Somerset MP Ian Liddell- Grainger is calling for clearer labelling of honey to prevent consumers being duped - and to protect British beekeepers.

He says much imported honey is adulterated with corn syrup and flavourings, enabling it to be sold cheaply.

He claims the uncontrolled trade is undercutting genuine British honey and threatening producers’ sales.

Mr Liddell-Grainger is writing to Defra Secretary George Eustice demanding the Government speeds up regulations to differentiate genuine, craft honey from inferior industrial products.

“People need to be told what they are buying,” he said.

“At the moment some so-called honey is available for as little as 69p a jar.

"Two things are certain about that: the contents are not what they claim to be – and whatever they are they've never seen the inside of a hive.”

A French TV crew recently uncovered a major scam involving the sale of allegedly genuine honey which had been adulterated with Chinese product– then traced the supply line back to a number of large Chinese plants producing flavoured sugar syrup.

Mr Liddell-Grainger said: “Consumers in the UK are still buying jars of cut-price honey in the belief they contain the genuine article.

“Real honey is a product which has a deserved reputation as being healthy and nourishing.

“Given that reputation, people are perhaps reluctant to question the integrity of what they are buying. They accept what the label tells them.

“But the downside of ‘honey’ being sold for less than £1 a jar is that when consumers encounter genuine British honey being sold for £5 or £6 they think someone is trying to rip them off - and don’t buy it.

“Yet prices in that region really do reflect the production costs involved in getting a jar of the proper, craft product to market.”

Mr Liddell-Grainger added: "We get through about 43,000 tons of honey each year in the UK and 95 per cent of that is imported.

“That indicates both the potential scale of the problem and how many consumers are probably being fooled into buying inferior imitations, rather than the real thing.

“We need to have clearer labelling. It’s not good enough to say a product ‘may contain Chinese honey’ if that ‘honey’ cannot legally be described as such in this country."