Mid Sussex District Council

The authority had developed a draft Service Plan 2008/2009 in line with the Service Planning Guidance in the Framework Agreement on Food Law Enforcement. A review of the previous year’s performance had been carried out and was reflected in the draft plan. Officers were appropriately authorised and carrying out their enforcement activities in line with their level of authorisation. It was recognised that at the time of the audit, the service and team managers were relatively new in post and were progressing service improvements.

The authority acknowledged that there were problems with their database and this was identified as a priority for action within the corporate and service plans. Action had been taken on a number of levels to try and resolve the issues. These problems prevented the collation of reliable information for internal operational and management purposes, and the provision of accurate and complete statistical monitoring data for submission to the Agency.

The authority was working to a tightly managed food hygiene inspection programme and had reported that they had inspected 100% of their planned programme of inspections for 2007/2008. This could not be fully verified as there were recognised difficulties in running comprehensive and accurate management reports from the database. However, the authority had set up and maintained a separate comprehensive spreadsheet for management of the inspection programme which ran alongside the database software. The authority was generally carrying out comprehensive inspections and recording findings.

A detailed internal monitoring procedure had been developed by the authority although this had not been fully implemented for all food law enforcement activities. However, it was evident that there was appropriate quantitative monitoring by managers of the inspection and sampling programmes and service requests. File checks on reactive work and formal enforcement activities confirmed that internal monitoring checks including monitoring of the quality of food hygiene inspections and a comprehensive checklist for hygiene improvement notices were being carried out but a more thorough system had recently been introduced.