verylittlecarrot on page 72 of the independent report linked to above, it says:
"Food law enforcement in the UK is the responsibility of local authorities and it is the responsibility of manufacturers and importers to ensure that products comply with necessary legislation.
...
For a food such as infant milk which is the sole source of nutrition for infants, it would appear reasonable that there was central responsibility for checking safety and composition. There does not, however, appear to be any independent system for monitoring the nutritional composition of infant formula in the UK. [my emphasis]
Those manufacturers who responded to us assured us that they made regular analytical checks of their products, but these data do not appear to be made available outside the manufacturing organisations and were not made available to us.
In theory, trading standards officers can take samples of any food product available for sale in the UK and send it for independent analysis, often with a public analyst. However, we could not find any evidence that analysis of any infant formula had been done by trading standards officers in the UK at any time before we started working on this review.
Public analysts and trading standards officers whom we spoke to said that it would be too expensive and too complex to analyse infant formula and they were more likely to investigate other forms of contamination.
After discussions about this with a public analyst in England, however, some analysis of macronutrient composition (carbohydrate and fats) in infant milks currently available was undertaken in May 2009 and made available to the Caroline Walker Trust (CWT). Whilst most of the analysed values for fat and sugar were similar to the declared values, there were some differences observed between declared an analysed values of linoleic acid (omega-6 fats), linolenic acid (omega-3 fats) and arachidon acid (and LCP) as shown in Table 19. This is just one random set of analysis of a small number of products, so it cannot be taken as indicative of overall content difficulties, but it does illustrate variations in declared and analysed contents. A number of milks analysed in this survey had only 50-60% of the declared content of fatty acids present."
I think it is a scandal that we are relying on companies to ensure that their product complies with the strict nutritional requirements laid down in law without any independent checking of the composition of something that so many babies in this country rely on as their only or main food source.