Agenda item

The Head of Worcestershire Regulatory Services (WRS) presented the Food Service and Food Standards Agency engagement report, and in doing so informed Board Members that;

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) was the main competent authority for food controls in England. The food function was devolved in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. The Agency was pushing local authorities recently to increase their commitments to food law enforcement and to align activities more closely with the letter of the Food Law Code of Practice.

After engagement with senior officers and lead members, the partners agreed to an uplift in the WRS budget specifically for Food Safety Act enforcement. This report explains the detail of this and how the additional expenditure would be deployed.

In line with the Systems Thinking approach taken in these functional areas by the partners since 2011, WRS had been piloting alternative approaches as financial pressures on local authorities forced the partners to make difficult decisions in relation to support for many of their services over an extended period. The FSA was made aware of WRS’s experiments at the time and expressed some interest in the work being done, albeit the FSA would not endorse any changes that occurred, no matter how beneficial.

During the audit visit in 2017, WRS officers were left with the clear impression that the FSA was moving in the direction of accepting that intelligence-driven regulatory services offered the most cost effective and efficient form of control model available. This clearly seemed to be the direction of travel in the reviews of the Food Standards and then Food Hygiene codes, which were clearly labelled as seeking to build the role of intelligence into process.

Following the initial consultation on the revision to the Food Hygiene code, the FSA decided not to go forward with further change before 2027. At the same time, its performance teams had indicated an expectation that authorities that had chosen to move away from aspects of the code would be expected to re-align their activities to be more reflective of the letter of what was required. This meant relying less on intelligence and going back to increased levels of traditional inspection and alternative enforcement approaches within the Code.

The Food Hygiene Code of Practice was made under section 40 of the Food Safety Act 1990. Local authorities were required to have regard to it, but the FSA was empowered by the legislation to seek Ministerial direction to make local authorities comply with it. Given this power, after much discussion, officers and lead members felt that at least moving some way towards the FSA’s requirements would be sensible. We would not accept that the approach taken by the service had created issues and there was no evidence of any significant problems arising from the approaches taken. Officers also hope that the FSA would engage fully with WRS when it came to revising the Food Hygiene code, as officers felt that there was much that the service could contribute in terms of our experience of working through intelligence.

The FSA had identified several areas, but the main area impacted was how the service addressed lower risk premises, those coded category D and E for the purposes of the Code. This represented over 4,000 of our approximately 5,800 registered food businesses across the county. The detailed business case indicated that, in 2009/10 there were 5123 food registrations across the six districts compared with the current 5791, representing an increase of 13%. Many of these had been in the lower risk categories.

Currently the service used a range of intervention forms to address these including inspection for those of the highest risk. Adhering to the letter of the Code would require an intervention every 2-years to category D premises, which the FSA would allow to alternate between inspection and allowable alternative intervention. The latter were required to be deployed with category E premises every 3 years.

Two further issues were raised by the FSA, one of which related to caring premises: everything from day nurseries to residential care and nursing homes. The premises in this group that met the criterion of having 20 persons attending or resident were subject to an additional risk score in the Code, which meant that they would score as category B and should be visited annually, in line with our other B-rated premises. The others, that did not trigger the additional risk factor in this group, had been assessed as other food businesses and many had been given a D rating. Most of these were good performers, scoring 4 and 5 stars routinely on the Food Hygiene rating scheme, so producing safe food and this had led to their reduced risk rating.  The FSA was, however, concerned that this did not address their inherent risk and wanted them to revert to category B. Officers had sought a compromise position on this point as they felt our approach to risk had been reasonable in this case and had asked to see risk assessment used by the FSA to reach this conclusion.

Rather than bluntly resisting, officers had offered to address those businesses that provided “full meals” as part of their service, which might be perceived to offer a greater risk than, for example, a day nursery that simply provided snacks or toast and jam to the children attending.  Again, this work could be accommodated within the resource uplift and by re-purposing some current vacant capacity (where officers had reduced hours,) to be dedicated to food law activities.

The final aspect was the timeliness of interventions at category A, B and C rated premises. The letter of the Code required these to be visited within 2 weeks either side of the due date, so a 4-week window. Our fully qualified Environmental Health Officer resource was used flexibly to address all aspects undertaken by the Community Environmental Health division. This meant that the service aimed to intervene with these premises in the financial year they were due, but not necessarily in the window specified. Whilst there were some premises that did fall into Category A (potentially hospitals and hospices,) that had to be visited every 6-months, many were usually poorly performing premises that would otherwise be rated B (annual visit,) C (18month visit interval,) or D (2-yearly visit.) With these premises, the approach taken was to work with them to bring them back to normal compliance rather than labelling them as category A and visiting them in 6-months. This was not a requirement of the Code, but officers felt that this was the right approach to take for the sake of the businesses and their customers.

Given that the increase in resourcing was mainly necessary to tackle our lower risk outlets, officers had suggested focusing recruitment on both specialist Senior Technical Officers, who could visit all premises, and Regulatory Support Officers, with the latter able to be trained to discharge interventions at category E premises and work with well performing category Ds. The intention was to recruit 3 Regulatory Support Officers and 2 Senior Technical Officers. The cost of this additional capacity, broken down following the normal partner contributions was detailed in the Appendix, on page 30 of the main agenda pack, along with an indication of how this would impact the overall spend for each partner. The Community Environmental Health Manager would also use a number of hours that had been released by several officers going part-time, to create a further Senior Technical Officer post at no additional cost to partners. This would be added to this capacity, so creating a team of 6FTE officers, dedicated to addressing mainly lower risk and newly registered premises, but also with some capacity to deal with some higher risk premises. This increase would necessitate changes to how the three Principal Officers within Community Environmental Health addressed the wider workload, but this could be achieved without compromising our approaches in other technical areas.

The resource increase had been agreed by the partners and was built into the medium-term financial plans in the recent budget-setting process, so the service could begin to move forward with this from April 2024. Whilst officers appreciated the current financial situation for the sector, these duties fell within statute and since there were powers to compel compliance, it seemed sensible to at least move toward what was required.

On 14^th February, the FSA had confirmed in a letter to Chief Executives that it would de-escalate its engagement with the WRS partners and move back to the normal level of engagement between its officers and our Food Lead. The letter indicated that they would still like to see further changes to our approach but, at this stage they would simply monitor our performance.

Members were therefore being asked to note the report and formally approve the increase in establishment as detailed in the report. The service would however continue to lobby for the intelligence-led approach to take a greater role in all forms of regulatory activity in the future as the service had demonstrated how this could succeed.

The Head f WRS further stated that officers did not want to abandon an intelligence led approach and that they would continue to lobby for this an intelligence led approach to be taken.

Some Board Members expressed their disappointment with the FSA and further stated that, WRS as an organisation visited food premises on behalf of residents and reacted and visited premises where residents had raised concerns. Members agreed that the approach being taken by WRS was the correct approach and best way forward for residents.

Members further expressed their sincere thanks to the Head of WRS and his team.

The Head of WRS responded to questions from Board Members and commented that Worcestershire authorities were not the only authorities being pushed by the FSA with regards to low level premises. Members were further reassured that the approach being adopted by WRS was included in the Risk Register and the WRS Service Plan 2024/2025. There were a significant number of low-risk retail premises offering only pre-packed drinks and snacks, small scale caterers and wet pubs, only doing beer, spirits and snacks; and that these were very different to pubs with a full food offering.

The Board had agreed to the retention of current agency staff until the successful recruitment to the new roles.  The Head of Service explained that Environmental Health Officer (EHO) had formally been identified by the Local Government Association as a hard to recruit to role and that the new Technical Officer roles might also be difficult to fill. Regulatory Support Officers could be new entrants into the profession and might be suitable to develop further to fulfil higher level roles in the future.  However, he did hope that the posts would be filled by the end of June 2024.  Should Members be supportive of the intention to recruit, as detailed on page 29 of the main agenda pack, then the Community Environmental Health Manager would look to advertise the vacancies as soon as possible.  The Head of Service explained that whilst anyone recruited to the fully qualified roles would be able to start contributing straight away, the Regulatory Support Officers would require training, but that they should be fully up to speed with requirements by October / November 2024.

RESOLVED that  

a)    the Food Service and Food Standards Agency engagement report, be noted, and

b)    the Board agrees to the consequent increase in establishment that flowed from the funding uplift as agreed by all partners.