FSA Consultation Letter, 23 March 2005

ENFORCEMENT - Proposed changes to the local authority food law enforcement monitoring system

The Food Standards Agency is currently undertaking an overall review of the monitoring system used for reporting on each local authority's performance on the enforcement of food law. Consultation of all local authorities will be carried out in two phases, with the first phase in progress below. Responses are requested by: 27 May 2005

Consultation details

Phase 1 consultation

The FSA would is seeking views on the proposals for simplifying the reporting of inspection data, and on a possible matrix, available at the link below, for measuring each local authority's overall performance. Colleagues are asked to let the FSA have their agreement or disagreement with, or to give their broader views on, each of the following proposals that are detailed in the letter sent to local authorities below:

• to reduce the number of categories of food premises from 10 to 6;
• to reduce the number of inspection categories from 4 to 2;
• to change from reporting inspections planned (at the start of the year) and those achieved, to inspections due and those outstanding (at the end of the year);
• the proposed content of the draft matrix;
• for advisory and educational work, see the worksheet page ‘Advisory-Education-Awards (4.1)' in the proposed matrix, should the number of businesses that have received an award be reported in absolute terms, or on a 'per 100 premises' basis? And should local authorities be asked to report only those businesses that have received an award within the financial year being reported on, or to report all businesses which currently hold an award, even if from a previous year?;
• the broader data requirement for identifying national trends; and
• details of any extra costs which they think may arise from these proposals, with reasons why.

Phase 2 consultation

Further detailed work in the review will be required, for example, on the matrix scoring systems and on definitions of individual data requirements. There will be a second general consultation on this later in the year, which will start once the responses to this consultation on the first phase, on the above proposals, have been collated and considered. The impact of revised EU data requirements under the Official Food and Feed Controls Regulation 882/2004 (replacing the Official Control Directive from 1 January 2006 ) are to be considered in a later phase of policy analysis work.

The documents mentioned above can be downloaded here:

• FSA Letter (pdf file)
• Assessment Matrix (Excel file)