A North Yorkshire MP has vowed to help an award winning cheese producer trapped in a "bureaucratic nightmare".

Anne McIntosh, MP for the Vale of York, is working with Shepherd's Purse Cheeses in a fight against the ruling that banned the company from marketing feta cheese.

The Thirsk company has been in a four-year battle with the European Commission, which called a halt to the marketing of Feta cheese that was made anywhere except in specific regions of Greece.

The firm now faces the enormous cost of re-marketing the same cheese under a new name.

Miss McIntosh is campaigning to overturn the directive to register feta as a protected food name. She wrote to the environment secretary, Margaret Beckett, on Tuesday to ask her to intervene.

"It is ludicrous that a local producer is being burdened with the cost of renaming and remarketing one of its major products after the European Commission perversely passed a directive to register "feta" as a protected food name," said Miss McIntosh.

"Shepherd's Purse has been successfully selling Yorkshire feta for more than 12 years and is now caught up in a bureaucratic nightmare.

"The Council of Ministers has failed to agree a qualified majority, without which the commission is threatening to act on its own. I am calling on Margaret Beckett to intervene to prevent this and safeguard the future of Yorkshire feta."