Tandridge District Council

Staff vacancies in the early part of 2006 had severely limited the food safety and licensing team’s capacity to deliver an effective food service. However, from June 2006 the appointment of two members of staff had brought the staff resource back to the establishment level and had resulted in improvements to the levels of food law enforcement work achieved. At the time of the audit, the service was anticipating a further period of decreased staff resource and had begun to consider measures to address this.

The authority had produced a Food Law Enforcement Service Plan for 2008/2009, which had been approved by members. Future service plans would benefit from the inclusion of additional information as set out in the service planning guidance in the Framework Agreement and should include comprehensive details of the scope and demands on the service, and both the financial and staff resources available to deliver the service.

The service had a procedure to ensure that the food premises database was up-to-date and that information relating to inspections and other food law enforcement activities were accurate.

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. Inspections of the authority’s approved establishment had been carried out at the correct frequency. However, the authority had yet to re-approve the establishment under European hygiene regulations introduced in 2006.

The authority had a procedure for the authorisation of officers, which required some development to ensure that the level of authorisation was clearly linked to individual officer’s qualifications, training and experience.

There was some evidence of quantitative internal monitoring of food premises inspections against the annual programme. Some recent changes had been introduced, including the production of a revised internal monitoring procedure. The auditors were advised that some quantitative monitoring checks were also undertaken but a means of recording these activities had not been implemented.