Bionic - interesting and Defra have produced an answer to your question rather than a definitive answer.
We need to split this between the feed hygiene regulations – in England The Feed (Hygiene and Enforcement) (England) Regulations 2005 - and The Animal by-Products Regulations 2005 – in particular Part 3.
The former put certain controls in place to ensure that only things that should be are fed to animals that are destined for the food chain, and the latter (inter alia) prevent the feeding of catering waste to pigs.
So if you don’t come under the feed hygiene regulations, then the animal by-products regulations still stop you feeding anything that has been through a catering establishment.
In essence the feed hygiene regulations apply to both producers of Animal feed and to any “business that uses animal feed” in “the production of food for Human consumption”.
The exclusions under the law include :
· the feeding of food-producing animals kept for private domestic consumption
· the feeding of animals not kept for food production
· the production of feed in some circumstances (if you are producing your own feed you should refer directly to the rules to see if you are exempt)
HOWEVER even if you come under the regulations (eg you are selling meat even to family and friends) you are NOT prevented from feeding bakery waste to animals, you simply need to register with the local authority. You then need to demonstrate that you have considered everything to prevent contamination of your feed – eg that you don’t sit the loaves next to meat in the car, equally that your grower pellets are not contaminated by pesticides ie you’re not storing you feed next to your rat poison. Unless you employ people, then this can be by a written statement stating how you get, and how you ensure that it is kept clean. If you have employees then you get in to signage and training records – quite doable, but a little more complicated.
Technically your supplier needs to be registered as well. If it is a supermarket, the chances are it will be as most/all of them supply something back into the animal chain, so generally are blanket registered in every county. A baker may not be. They must have suitable HACCP procedures in place. I know nothing in law that requires you to check that your supplier is registered – but both laws come from long EU regs, and it is possible I have missed a bit!
So worst case you need to register and your supplier should be registered.
As for danger, the risk is direct contact with meat that has foot & mouth disease (Defra make this general disease, but it is only F&M that has ever impacted the UK or Europe). Clearly Tesco (for instance) has procedures in place to ensure meat is never touched by people who don’t handle meat ie they have end to end separation of duties. This includes disposal, as meat cannot go to landfill under EU 1774/2002, so is kept separate at the back of the shop as well. Clearly a veggie would be up in arms to find that their tesco loaf has been in contact with some beef (quite rightly), and this simply doesn’t happen. The greater risk would be an independent baker who makes for instance sausage rolls. However even here the risk is not contact with meat but contact with a piece of meat that has come from an animal that had F&M. This would either be bush meat that regularly comes into the UK in suitcases (Africa has F&M endemic) or there is a slight risk of meat from countries like Argentina, who vaccinate against F&M – thus making it impossible to tell an animal that has F&M from one that has been vaccinated – and no vaccine is 100%. Now that describes the risk, and I am certainly not advocating anyone breaks the law, but feeding bread from a registered source that has proper HACCP procedures in place, and ensuring that you do the same introduces no risk to the food chain or to other keepers of pigs.
Feeding bread to growers doesn’t really do much good, but can contribute to reducing costs for sows.