Food Safety Performance and Service Priorities
Food Safety Performance 2010/11 and Current Service
Priorities
Performance over 2010/11
The Council is the food enforcement authority for
over almost 1000 food businesses. Each food business is assessed on
the basis of the risk it poses and allocated an inspection at an
appropriate interval ranging from six months to five years.
During 2010/11 we completed our entire inspection programme. A
total of 484 food inspections were undertaken plus a further 104 of
our lowest risk food businesses were contacted via questionnaire to
establish the current nature of their food operation. A further 198
re-visit inspections were undertaken to ensure that works required
by food safety inspectors had been completed. A further 124
advisory, complaint and sampling visits were made to food
businesses over the course of the year.
The food service investigated 154 complaints and service
requests. These ranged from complaints about unsatisfactory
food/food premises to dealing with local and national food alerts.
The food service also dealt with 182 statutory reported infectious
diseases that were considered potentially food related illness.
This was an increase in the number of notifications compared to the
previous year.
The service completed its food sampling programme, taking 150
food and environmental samples. Of these samples 9 were classified
as borderline and 40 were classed as poor quality results. The
remaining samples were either satisfactory or classified as good
quality. Guidance was given to food proprietors in regard to these
unsatisfactory samples and re-samples were taken to ensure that
results had improved.
Further details on food sampling are provided on our
Food Sampling
webpage.
We continue to provide support to food businesses. More
information and resources were made available to businesses via the
Council’s website. Our food hygiene training programme was expanded
and 90 food handlers were awarded food hygiene qualifications.
Further details on hygiene training are provided on our
Food Hygiene
Training webpage.
Looking beyond the
routine work, the Scores on the Doors scheme has now been operating
since October 2007. This scheme involves publishing, via the
Council’s website, the risk ratings given by food officers
following their food safety inspections. You can now see the
hygiene results for over 800 premises on the Council’s website.
As a result of publishing the food safety inspection ratings, we
have seen the percentage of excellent (5 star) premises increase
from 3.3% to 32%. Having virtually a third of our food businesses
on a 5 stars is a truly excellent result. Even more importantly, we
have seen the number of very poor (zero star) premises decrease
from 6.3% to under 0.6%. The five premises currently falling into
the very poor category are the subject of focused enforcement
activity. These figures indicate that food produced within the
Borough is safer since we introduced Scores on the Doors and that
public health is better protected as a direct result of the work
undertaken by the Council.
Further details on Scores on the Doors are provided on our
Scores on the
Doors webpage.
A further indicator of the success of Scores on the Doors is the
interest and support it has received from the public. Almost 70,000
enquiries have been made on the website since the launch. The other
good news is that the Food Standards Agency (
FSA
) has decided to adopt a five
star scheme like ours as the national standard.
You can find more information on our Scores on the Doors
webpage.
Service objectives for 2011/12
Our main objectives are as follows:
- To carry out food safety inspections. The programme being to
make contact with 510 food businesses 388 of which will be actual
inspections. We will continue to target our attention on those
businesses posing the greatest risk to food safety. Our objective
will be to further decrease the number of premises falling into the
lower Scores on
the Doors categories.
- To undertake food complaint investigations.
- To continue operating the Scores on the Doors website and increase our
level of publicity for the scheme.
- To continue promoting Safer Food Better Business ( SFBB )
resources.
- To continue supporting food businesses. To develop in
particular services that assist new and prospective food business
proprietors.
- To continue providing Food Hygiene Training for businesses.
- To maintain and further develop the food pages on the Council’s website.
- To undertake a programme of Food Sampling.
- To investigate notifications of food related Infectious
Diseases.
- To respond to food safety incidents and respond to Food Hazard
Alerts.
- To support other public sector organisations involved in food
safety work across the county and nationally.
Contact Us
If you wish to know more information please contact the Food
Team:
Email: envhealth@ashford.gov.uk.
Telephone: 01233 330581
Fax: 01233 330469
Post: Environmental Services, Civic Centre, Tannery
Lane, Ashford TN23 1PL
This webpage was updated on
8/23/2011