Display of Care Inspectorate Scores on the Doors now compulsory for care homes in Wales. From 31 March 2025 all care homes in Wales are required to display their Care Inspectorate scores both on the premises and on their website. More details here

5 star compliance now up to 76.6%. The latest performance report from FSA shows that a record 76.6% of food businesses now achieve 5 stars.

Announcing the launch of our sister site – Paws on the Doors!

We’re looking to do for Animal Welfare Licensing what Scores on the Doors did for Food Hygiene over the last 20 years. [Today 76% of all food businesses achieve the top 5  star rating, up 60%. Unregistered businesses have been halved.]

Colchester City Council and Gravesham Borough Council are publishing their data from 10 March. In addition, Horsham District Council will be launching on 14 March; Maldon District Council the following week; with more to follow.

By publishing the details of animal operators on a single site www.animal-licensing.uk members of the public are now able to find out about businesses providing Dog Boarding, Breeding, Daycare and Home boarding as well as  Catteries, Horse hire and Pet shops.

Cross-boundary searching will start to take effect as more and more authorities’ data is published over the next few weeks and months.

For each operator we provide all (authorised, disclosed) contact details as well as information such as the valid licence number and expiry date, star rating and capacity.

Waltham Forest finds four more fraudulent FHRS stickers on display.

Clip from BBC London 4/3/2025 here

Fewer Inspectors, more outlets.

FSA analysis found resources are considerably lower than a decade ago, with 9.1 percent fewer food hygiene staff and 32.5 percent fewer food standards officers in post by October 2023 compared to 2012/13 – despite a 5.7 percent rise in the number of businesses in the past decade.

Fuller coverage of the analysis can be found here

Link to last night’s Rip Off Britain article which features display of fraudulent Food Hygiene stickers. Article starts 43m30s in.

Interesting to note that a recent Which? survey found 12% were being incorrectly displayed.

New Food Crime Factsheet. A handy 4 page summary just released by IFST helps you avoid becoming a victim of Food Fraud.

https://lnkd.in/eCNvqyF2

Scores on the Doors coming to Ireland?

The Food Safety Authority of Ireland has released its strategy for the next 5 years, which includes the following as an objective:

“An evaluation of the evidence relating to hygiene rating schemes for food businesses and a recommendation made on their future place in Ireland’s official control system.”

Watch this space…

New FHRS survey results from 6,000 adults recently published by FSA shows 86% of respondents had heard of the FHRS. Of those:

A) Would eat at a restaurant or takeaway if they saw a food hygiene rating sticker with a rating of:

FHRS 4                 94%

FHRS 3                 61%

B) Would not eat at a restaurant or takeaway if they saw a food hygiene rating sticker with a rating of:

FHRS 2                 82%

FHRS 1                 95%

FHRS 0                 95%

Other findings:

58% would be unlikely to eat at a food business that did not have the food hygiene rating sticker present at the entrance.

91% thought that food businesses should be required by law to display their food hygiene rating at their premises.

93% thought that businesses providing an online food ordering service should display their food hygiene rating where it can clearly be seen by customers before they order food.

Plans for supermarkets to “Mark their own homework” have been delayed and a new consultation process started.

Legislative plans put on hold until the conclusions of a new Senior Steering forum are presented to the board in June 2025.

Full story courtesy of today’s The Grocer below:

The Food Standards Agency has carried out a major climbdown over controversial plans to allow supermarkets and other large food businesses to run their own food safety inspections, after a major backlash from local authorities and campaigners.

Last month, The Grocer revealed food safety experts were calling on ministers to block moves for the FSA to give supermarkets day-to-day control over the Scores on the Doors food hygiene ratings system. They had also expressed outrage over wider moves to extend the so-called “national regulation” to a much wider group of businesses, also including manufacturers and large out-of-home companies, so cash-strapped local authorities could focus their limited resources on smaller “rogue operators”.

However, today the agency admitted there had been a lack of transparency over the proposals and announced it had put the plans on hold.

In August, The Grocer revealed the FSA planned to allow supermarkets to take over the responsibility for their own food hygiene ratings under the Scores on the Doors scheme, following year-long trials carried out with  Aldi, Asda, Sainsbury’s, Tesco and Waitrose.

The agency subsequently went even further, saying it was looking to extend the concept across large food manufacturers and food to go operators. It added it was working with the food safety regimes in Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland, in a bid to try to create a UK-wide “national regulation” system.

However, anger from food safety experts and local authorities over the plans was heightened after a BBC investigation found businesses including Sainsbury’s had been misleading customers over their food hygiene scores.

Board papers published today ahead of the FSA’s forthcoming December meeting set out plans for a rethink.

“One of the common themes we heard is a clear need for greater transparency around the proof-of-concept trial,” the documents say.

“We acknowledge that it would have been better in retrospect to have published the trial evaluation earlier, and provided more opportunity to share detailed information about the trial and the evaluation. 

“We have also heard a lot of questions and concerns about how any process of national level scrutiny would work in detail, including how it would interact with the work of primary authorities and local authorities, how risks would be managed, and how complaints would be dealt with.”

The FSA has now promised an “intensive engagement period on the proof of concept”, revealing it had  set up a new Senior Steering Forum including environmental health and Trading Standards bosses from across the UK, which would report back in early 2025.

The board added that the retailers involved in the trial had said they were still “committed“ to the proposals, despite the fallout.

“We will keep working with the large retailers and their primary authorities to refine the approach taken during the trial, and to share the learning to date,” the FSA said.

Meanwhile, the FSA told The Grocer proposals for longer-term legislative change, which would be required by the plans to extend national regulation across the food sector, had been put on hold.

“We’ve paused any policy work on ideas for longer-term reforms, to focus on engagement with stakeholders about the trial and potential next steps,” a spokeswoman said.

A previous report by the FSA said it believed there was a case in principle for more strategic, national-level regulatory assurance of the “biggest, most influential businesses”, which would see the FSA act as a national regulator rather than local authorities.

“A national level regulator could leverage these relationships to tackle non-compliance at a business, rather than local store level; to understand risk better across the food system, and to convene large businesses to share best practice on food safety,” it said at the time.