Food hygiene enforcement 'on the increase'

The Food Standards Agency has just published their "annual report on UK local authority food law enforcement" across the UK. This shows a small increase of 1% in the number of instances of formal enforcement actions carried out on food establishments in the UK since 2012.

In case of interest the full report can be found here: 'Annual report on UK local authority food law enforcement'. The summary of the key findings are at pages 4 and 5 and include:

622,015 food establishments were registered with LAs in the UK as at 31 March 2014, an increase of 2.3% on 2012/13 (608,143). Of these, 34,529 (5.6%) of registered UK food establishments were not yet rated (NYR3) for food hygiene risk, a decrease from 5.9% in 2012/13.

▼ LAs reported that a total of 524,491 interventions were carried out in 2013/14 (411,077 food hygiene and 113,414 food standards) a decrease of 0.2% on the reported number carried out in 2012/13 (525,588).

▲ 185,385 formal enforcement actions4 were carried out in 2013/14, an overall increase of 1.0% from 2012/13 (183,566). Compared to 2012/13 returns, the data shows that the number of establishments subject to:

▲ Seizure, detention and surrender of food increased by 26.5% (from 543 in 2012/13 to 687 in 2013/14)

▲ Remedial action and detention notices increased by 18.3% (from 213 to 252)

▲ Simple cautions increased by 4.8% (from 419 to 439)

▲ Prosecutions increased by 2.3% (from 398 to 407)

▲ Written warnings increased by 1.4% (from 175,230 to 177,746)

▼ Voluntary closure decreased by 5.4% (from 1,024 to 969)

▼ Emergency prohibition orders decreased by 12.6% (from 318 to 278)

▼ Improvement notices decreased by 14.4% (from 5,274 to 4,513)

▼ Prohibition orders decreased by 36.0% (from 125 to 80)

▼ Suspension / revocation of approval or licence decreased by 36.4% (from 22 to 14)