South Bucks District Council

The food law enforcement service had undergone a period of change in 2006/2007, due to staff absences and recruitment issues and subsequently the authority had been reliant on contract staff to carry out inspections within their programme. Due to recruitment issues, the authority had also been reduced to one authorised officer during 2006/2007. However, an increased staff resource has resulted in improvements in the service.

The authority had produced a draft food service delivery plan for 2008/2009, which broadly followed the guidance in the service planning guidance of the Framework Agreement on Local authority Food Law Enforcement. The service had historically produced the food service delivery plan every three years for the following fourth year. It was now intended to prepare this plan annually and report any variances to the Health and Housing Portfolio Advisory Group.

The service had developed and reviewed some of their procedures prior to the audit, however the procedures needed to be expanded to incorporate the full range of enforcement options.

The authority had a draft procedure for the authorisation of officers, which was currently awaiting approval. At the time of the audit, officers had not been correctly authorised to undertake the full range of duties under current hygiene legislation. Training record files were incomplete and lacked adequate details of officer qualifications and the courses attended.

File checks indicated that, historically, inspections had not always been carried out at the correct frequency, which may be attributable to the staffing difficulties previously encountered by the service. Currently the authority had a number of high and medium risk inspections that were overdue from the current and previous year’s inspection programme.

The authority had recently developed an internal monitoring procedure for their food law enforcement activities. At the time of the audit, neither this procedure nor its predecessor had been fully implemented by the authority.