Agenda item
Food Standards Audit
This report sets out the background to the July 2014 Food Standards Authority audit of the Council's discharge of its Food Safety Act 1990 duties, the report findings, the council’s response and progress since.
Minutes:
Members considered the report on last year’s Food Standards audit of the Council’s discharge of its Food Standards Act 1990 duties. The Chair welcomed Councillor Denselow (Lead Member for Stronger Communities) and David Thrale (Head of Regulatory Services) to the meeting. Councillor Denselow stated that he recognised the concern about the capacity to carry out the over due inspections but pointed out that the Council was being expected to provide the same level of service as it had done in past years when the Council was better funded. At the same time the borough had a rising population and more premises to inspect. The number of outstanding inspections now stood at 192 and he assured the Committee that these would be dealt with by the end of the year by utilising additional resources from elsewhere in the service. In the meantime Regulatory Services was undergoing a review which would need to establish the basis for being able to sustain the service in the future. The Food Standards Authority would be visiting the Council during the following week and Councillor Denselow undertook to ensure Scrutiny Committee was informed of the outcome to this.
The Head of Regulatory Services explained the staffing structure and the challenges facing the team. In response to questions, he explained the rationale behind not prioritising the higher category inspections. It was the smaller businesses that often created more work in bringing them into compliance.
Councillor Denselow emphasised the financial pressures by explaining that resources had been re-allocated in order to eliminate the outstanding inspections and this in turn put pressure on other parts of the service. The Committee was informed that although there were resources available to recruit additional staff this would still not be sufficient to meet the level of inspection and enforcement demanded by the Food Standards Authority. This was a position faced by many other councils. In answer to a question from the committee, the Head of Regulatory Services confirmed that consideration was being given to different models of service delivery.
Councillor Denselow acknowledged that there was a need to get a message across to local residents in response to press headlines, that the number of outstanding inspections did not mean the borough was full of dangerous premises.
The question of how the present situation impacted on the health of local residents was raised. In response it was admitted that it was hard to measure this and no precise data existed to help identify the potential health impacts.
The Chair referred to the action plan attached as appendix A to the report and asked if there were any concerns arising from it. It was explained that where the ‘Action taken to date’ column was in red it tended to indicate that decisions had yet to be taken to deal with the required improvement target, rather than to any underlying issue so progress was being made on all the targets included in the plan.
RESOLVED:
that the findings of the Food Standards audit carried out in July 2014, the issues arising, response to date and the planned actions be noted.
Supporting documents: