Leeds City Council

The Council's food hygiene law enforcement function was delivered as part of a wider health agenda and within the context of the Food Strategy for Leeds 2005. One of the principal aims of the Strategy was 'to ensure that all food produced, prepared or sold in Leeds is safe to eat and will not cause ill health'.

However, the Authority was not inspecting food premises on a strictly risk rated basis and at the frequency required by the Food Law Code of Practice. Furthermore, a significant number of premises had not been allocated a risk rating. Consequently, there was a considerable backlog of known low risk and potential high risk premises overdue a food hygiene inspection. The proportion of food businesses overdue inspection appeared to represent at least 45% of the total food businesses in the Authority's area, many of these were low risk or closed and would not have been included within the inspection programme, although some had not been visited for inspection purposes for up to 15 years.

In order to meet its internal annual performance target for food hygiene inspections, the Authority had authorised several non-specialist officers to undertake food hygiene inspections of higher risk food premises. However, several of these officers, although fully qualified as Environment Health Officers (EHOs), did not fully meet the qualifications and experience criteria for carrying out food law enforcement as required by the Food Law Code of Practice.

Problems with the Service's food premises database, which was part of a corporate software package, prevented the collation of reliable information for internal operational and management purposes, and the provision of accurate statistical monitoring data for submission to the Agency.