Foodlaw-Reading
Dr David Jukes, The University of Reading, UK
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FSA Publication, 29 October 2018
Welcome to the 11th Regulating Our Future Newsletter. In this issue, we are focusing on the progress we have made on our National Inspection Strategies and the next steps for the roll out of the digital service. These are both significant parts of our overall design for a modernised regulatory framework.
Last month the Board agreed the three key standards that will underpin our national inspection strategies initiative. These standards are vitally important because they will determine our recognition between a business and a primary authority and give people confidence that their food is safe.
We have also just published our latest paper about the programme as a whole [See news item: 23 October 2018]. It’s called “Changing food regulation: what we’ve done, where we go next” and it outlines the progress we’ve made on delivering National Inspection Strategies and Enhanced Registration; how our work on regulating private assurance is progressing; the approach we are taking to designing a sustainable funding model for the new regime; and our renewed efforts to make it mandatory to display Food Hygiene Ratings at food premises in England. We launched the paper at our parliamentary reception earlier this month at which we also showed how the online registration service works in practice.
And finally, earlier this month we said farewell to Nina Purcell, who has retired from the FSA. I wish her all the best in her retirement and welcome Maria Jennings, Director for Regulatory Compliance, People and Northern Ireland who has taken over the reins.
Heather Hancock FSA Chairman
Primary Authority National Inspection Strategies
We have published an evaluation of our National Inspection Strategies’ (NIS) work and draft standards that local authorities and business partnerships will have to meet if they wish to have a NIS for food hygiene recognised by the FSA.
National Inspection Strategies (NIS) have existed as a concept since Primary Authority was introduced, but no NIS has been developed for food partnerships to date. We see a potential for NIS to be part of our work to recognise compliant and transparent food businesses and help focus local authority activity towards those food businesses that are performing poorly or need more help.
The pathfinder trial that we published last month is our first look into whether local authority regulators can access and use business data to predict how businesses are complying with hygiene regulations. We found an 80% match between the predicted food hygiene ratings based on a food business’ data, and the actual rating given by an LA following an inspection. Where there was not a match, we have been interested to explore why this was the case, and what we can learn from the trial. We’re learning from the pathfinder evaluation and will be following up with the recommendations from the report.
We have also published three draft standards that will ensure that all parties in an NIS meet robust and demanding standards. It’s important to remember that if all those involved do not meet our robust and demanding draft standards then we will not recognise the NIS. In practice this would mean that the businesses’ individual outlets would continue to be inspected by local authorities as they are at present.
A small number of primary authority partnerships in England are actively considering developing NIS where the primary authority will use business data and information to inform the frequency of local food inspections in England. This will give us an opportunity to refine the draft standards while testing how they work in practice – for the primary authority partnership, for local authorities and for the FSA in ‘assuring the assurers’.
Our work is still in development, and we welcome feedback from all stakeholders on the draft standards and our work to date.
You can find out more about our work around primary authority national inspection strategies here or watch this animation below:
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To watch the video on YouTube, click on image. |
Preparing Local Authorities for changes to food business registration
We have begun to pilot the online food business registration service and have several Local Authorities on board and actively using the digital service, these include: Wrexham County Borough Council, Dorset Councils Partnership serving: North Dorset District Council, West Dorset District Council and Weymouth & Portland Borough Council, Purbeck District Council, Mid and East Antrim Borough Council and Shared Regulatory Services for Bridgend, Cardiff and The Vale of Glamorgan.
To date, nearly 30 new food business registrations have been submitted via the service, with people using smart phones, laptops and tablets to complete the registration.
Becky Pomeroy, Team leader at Wrexham County Borough Council said
“As a pilot local authority we have been given the opportunity to test and connect to the new online registration service. Registration details entered online by a food business operator now pass straight into a holding area on our management information system for validating. We don’t have to manually input new premises details into the system and this can save up to 15 minutes of officer time per registration. The system correctly identifies the opening date of a business and plans an inspection accordingly. I’ve also asked a food business operator to go online and formally register their details during an inspection thereby removing the need to chase up information at a later date.”
We are receiving good feedback from pilot LAs and users to help further develop this beta service. In particular, the benefits of having the registration data received direct to their management information systems (MIS).
We’re working with the major local authority management information system (MIS) providers to rollout the new service. We also recognise that some local authorities may have their own standalone systems and we will be developing approaches to ensure they are included in the rollout.
A registration API, which is the standard approach for moving data between systems or organisations, will enable the local authority MIS to pull-in food business registrations captured on the FSA’s new web forms. We are working with Local Authority MIS providers to adapt their products, so they can securely import registrations through the API.
We have recently sent a survey aimed at Local Authority Senior IT leaders to build our understanding of the IT landscape. We are asking for your support in asking IT leaders to complete the survey, as this will help our planning for a smooth transition to the new digital registration service.
Over the coming months we will be gradually rolling out the digital service to other Local Authorities and aim to have at least 40 onboard by April 2019.
