Audit of meat establishments

When determining how often we audit a business, we currently look at the type of processes carried out, the throughput and the food business operator’s record of compliance.

The greater the potential risk to public health and, in slaughterhouses, to animal health and welfare, the more often we will audit. The audit frequency currently varies from at least once every two months, to three, five or eight months.

We want to strengthen and streamline our audit arrangements so we are looking into this at the moment. Our work in this area will be linked to developing a rating scheme for FSA approved meat establishments – a bit like the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme in place for food premises in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, or the Food Hygiene Information Scheme in Scotland.

At the moment, audit arrangements are slightly different in Northern Ireland. Once we complete our review of audit arrangements, we plan to publish audits for FSA approved meat establishments across the UK.

If you would like to find out more about the FSA’s audits of approved meat establishments, look at Chapter 4.2 of our Manual for Official Controls (via link further down page).

Audits completed after 1 November 2011 for FSA approved meat establishments in England, Scotland and Wales are published at the link below. These are as issued to the food business operator, but we have taken out potentially sensitive information (such as a personal details) and detailed technical information.

We have listed establishments by their approval number, name and type (red or white meat slaughterhouse, red or white meat cutting plant or approved game handling establishment), their town, county and country.

The link below will take you to a separate Excel worksheet. You will need to enable the macros in order to open it. Instructions are in the worksheet. Clicking on the links in the final column of the worksheet will take you to the individual audit report for the selected establishment.

We update the audit reports on the FSA website on a monthly basis (typically towards the end of each month). Food business operators have up to 28 days to appeal an audit and we won’t publish an audit report on the website before this time has passed. Therefore, as we are only publishing audits completed after 1 November 2011, it will take a while for the website to have audits for each and every FSA approved meat establishment.