Foodlaw-Reading

Dr David Jukes, The University of Reading, UK

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Food Law News - UK - 2018

FSA News Item, 13 September 2018

ENFORCEMEN T - FSA publishes local authority food law enforcement information

Annual report on local authority food law enforcement - For England, Northern Ireland and Wales: 1 April 2017 to 31 March 2018

A copy of this report is available on this site (click on image). For more details and to access the supporting data, see: https://www.food.gov.uk/about-us/local-authorities#monitoring-local-authority-activity

The FSA has today published official statistics on food law enforcement by local authorities in England, Wales and Northern Ireland for the year 2017/18. The information provided by local authorities and compiled by the FSA, gives a detailed breakdown of enforcement activity across the three countries.

The new data show:

Nina Purcell, Director of Regulatory Delivery at the FSA, said:

'It’s encouraging that local authorities have made improvements in the percentage of interventions achieved and are continuing to target their activities at food businesses where food safety risks are the highest or where food fraud is more likely.

'However, the 10% reduction in sampling by local authorities remains an issue and while the percentage of interventions are increasing there remains a shortfall of 13% for food hygiene. The low percentage of planned interventions achieved for food standards is also a continuing concern.

'We are identifying and monitoring local authorities which are having difficulties with planning and delivery of the food law enforcement services through a new balanced scorecard approach. This is a digitally enabled tool which uses additional internal and external data, including FHRS data, to help provide a more rounded and more up-to date-picture of performance. This will also enable us to more easily visualise performance data on a national basis.'

Background

The Framework Agreement on the Delivery of Official Feed and Food Controls by local authorities is the mechanism by which the FSA sets out the standards for local authority food law services, which includes the FSA’s monitoring and audit processes.

The FSA monitors local authority performance through Local Authority Enforcement Monitoring System (LAEMS) returns and reports on an annual basis which are published online.

LAEMS is a web-based system to which local authorities upload data generated from the local system on which they record data on food law enforcement activities. Once uploaded to LAEMS, the local authority data are aggregated to the pre-defined categories required by the FSA e.g. interventions, sampling and enforcement.


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