Moyle

Whilst the Council was strong in providing advice to businesses, including the provision of a range of hygiene training courses, and in reactive work, the audit highlighted a number of key organisational and operational deficiencies in the delivery of the food law enforcement service. Some of these operational difficulties resulted primarily from an acute shortage of enforcement officers for a period of 18 months prior to November 2002. The Council had not appointed sufficient authorised officers to deliver the programme of planned inspections. Minimum inspection frequencies for both food hygiene and food standards were not being achieved with the majority of lower risk premises overdue inspection at the time of the audit. File records prior to November 2002, for both food hygiene and food standards inspections, were in many cases non-existent and in general inadequate to allow a full assessment of the Council's performance in some areas of the Standard. There was little evidence of internal monitoring to ensure that the Council was achieving an effective level of service.

The findings of this audit reflect many of the findings of a third party audit carried out in November 2001. It was noted however that progress had been made in implementing some of the recommendations of that audit.