City of York Council is facing a backlog of around 300 food hygiene inspections due to the impact of the Covid pandemic.
Lockdown restrictions meant that the public protection team were unable to carry out a large number of inspections, according to a council report on its food service plan for 2022/2023.
Around one third of food hygiene inspections due to take place during 2021/2022 did not happen.
Food businesses are inspected by the council and given a rating of zero to five. The authority has responsibility for wider food standards, including animal feed activities.
The city is home to around 2,000 food premises in a typical year, the majority being restaurants and catering businesses.
The report stated: “As a result of the coronavirus pandemic and current economic situation we have already seen an increased turnover of business ownership in the restaurant and catering food sector, and anticipate that this will continue in the year ahead.
“This ‘business churn’ places a strain on the team’s resources due to the requirement to undertake inspections of these new premises.”
The problem is not unique to York and the council is following a plan to address the issue – making “good progress”.
The Food Standards Agency’s (FSA) Covid recovery plan is being used to help prioritise the service to deal with the greatest risks to public health and safety.
The FSA advised the council to prioritise higher risk food businesses for inspections during the pandemic.
“The aim of this being to reduce risk of transmission of the virus, reduce the burden on local authority resources being used to combat coronavirus, but ensure that food hygiene standards were still being met by higher risk or poorer performing food businesses,” the report said.
Apart from businesses which registered late in the year, throughout 2021/2022, the public protection team were able to undertake all the interventions required by the FSA’s recovery plan.
Just under 90 per cent of the businesses received a broadly compliant food hygiene rating (a score of three, four or five) and 41 per cent received a score of five.
Across all businesses in York, including those not inspected this past year, 97 per cent are rated as broadly compliant and 75 per cent have received a food hygiene rating of five.
The council is to keep following the latest FSA guidance and had 665 inspections planned for the period April 2022 – March 2023.
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