Northumberland County Council

The Authority had developed a procedure on the internal monitoring arrangements for the food and feeding stuffs law enforcement service. However, this needed to be further developed to include all areas of enforcement activity contained in the Standard.

In practice, the Authority was monitoring its key performance indicators as outlined in its Food Service Plan. However, internal monitoring of qualitative aspects of the food service was not comprehensive or frequent enough to be effective.

The Service had not developed many of the procedures required by the Standard which would have acted as a bench mark for systematic and effective monitoring.

The Authority was participating in an inter authority audit scheme and had been audited as part of this initiative. Many of the issues that were highlighted during this audit had been raised during the inter authority audit but had not yet been addressed.