Scarborough Council approves new food safety plan as regulating service reports increasing workloads

Approved on Friday August 26 by cabinet member Cllr Michelle Donohue-Moncrieff, the food safety service plan for 2022/23 sets out the council’s plans for maintaining and improving food standards within the borough.

According to the plan, there are 2,246 food premises within the borough, a number that the council says is “large” in relation to the borough’s population of 108,000 people.

The commercial regulation service, which is tasked with overseeing the standards checks and implementation, has a budget of £311,000 for 2022/23, of which around £12,000 will be spent on external contractors to assist with checking standards in food premises.

The service aims to inspect different categories of establishments and premises based on a list of priorities, however, the pandemic severely affected the council’s ability to carry out those checks.

The council’s food safety plan states that “a substantial amount of interventions became due or overdue and a significant number of new food business registrations were also received during this time period”.

In 2020/21, the authority reported receiving more than 2,200 requests for Covid-19 advice and complaints about businesses operating illegally, while in the following year the figure stood at 416.

The plan also states that new domestic legislation combined with the UK’s departure from the EU has increased workloads for the service.

According to the council, the service has been asked for “an increasing number of food export certificates” by food manufacturers and exporters in recent years, in particular, following Brexit as “exporting businesses now require certification for their goods to enter the EU market.”

“The process for issuing these certificates involves considerably more officer time than others and charges are made on a cost recovery basis according to complexity.”

However, since businesses fully reopened in July 2021, the service team has made “significant progress in addressing the backlog of inspections”.

According to the report, the food hygiene rating scheme also continues to be successful “in raising hygiene standards” with 92.6% of food businesses, as of March 2022, rated as either good or very good.