Agenda item

P O’Day provided a presentation on the food hygiene service, and members were asked if they had any questions.

 

Cllr Timmis asked if Dacorum inspected mobile vans selling food at markets/on the street.

 

P O’Day said that mobile premises registered in Dacorum were inspected, but if they were registered elsewhere and traded in Dacorum, it very much depended.  If Dacorum had a formal arrangement with the registering authority, then the Council would inspect it, for example a business registered in Watford and trading in Dacorum.  However, if the business moved from market to market, they would be inspected by the registering authority for that district.  With a big event, for example Chillfest, the Council would probably do a cursory check on these businesses and advise the organisers to permit only caterers who are 4 or 5 star rated.

 

Cllr Timmis asked if businesses involving a caravan selling coffee or tea at a big event, for example the Hertfordshire Show, or some sort of smaller outdoor event, have to be registered, even though they were not doing much.

 

P O’Day replied that it depended on whether there was an undertaking, as per the relevant regulation EC1782002.  If the business was being done on a regular basis, even if it was very low risk, it would still have to be registered.   However, if it was a church group fundraiser done once per year, it wouldn’t have to be registered.

 

Cllr Riddick asked if things like the sausage sizzle fundraisers that had been run outside the Homebase store in Apsley had been registered and were being inspected.

 

P O’Day wasn’t aware of food being sold at this location.  Generally if large stores like Homebase ran a promotion involving food, the Council would advise them as it does event organisers, i.e. ensure caterers were 4 or 5 star rated, registered with a local authority and covered with the correct liability insurance.  If it was a regular undertaking, like the van at the B&Q car park, then it would be inspected, but if it was ad hoc, it would make things more difficult to control.  He said he would look into this particular case.

 

Cllr Riddick asked how one could differentiate a counterfeit food hygiene rating sign from a genuine one in a restaurant window.

 

P O’Day replied there was a handwritten part of the sign which states Dacorum, the date of the inspection, and the signature of the officer who did the inspection.  Verification was available on the Council’s website.  If a sign is false, it’s a trading standard offence, and the Council has reported businesses which have displayed old signs.

 

Cllr Hicks asked if the Council has an obligation to confirm if caterers have to have a food hygiene standard for a one-off event.

 

P O’Day said that if one is hiring a professional caterer, he would strongly recommend choosing only one that has a 4 or 5 star rating, has appropriate insurance and is registered with its local authority.  However, if the event involved a group of people getting together, for example at a street party, these requirements would not be necessary. 

 

Cllr Hicks said that once a month there was a street food event in Tring, where the Town Council hired the traders who sell food and drink.  He couldn’t remember what was in the hiring conditions, and he wasn’t sure about the food safety ratings, but the Town Council had public liability insurance.

 

P O’Day advised that in order to protect itself, the Town Council should look for 4 or 5 star food safety ratings, make sure the sellers were registered with a local authority, (one could ask them for a letter to confirm that their businesses are registered), and ensure the traders have had food hygiene training.  There was a lot of that training available online, but it would be better to be taught a course, so one could interact with a tutor.  The Chartered Institute of Environmental Health provided the benchmark training, but it didn’t have to be provided by the institute as a lot of private equivalents were available.

 

Cllr Hicks asked if there was anything on the Council’s website or online to which he could refer the Clerk to the Town Council, to ensure they were complying with regulations.

 

P O’Day replied the Council was already giving advice to people who run events, but he could provide something if required.  Cllr Hicks said he would be grateful for the advice.

 

Cllr Timmis referred to the legal action that had been taken against an illegal halal chicken slaughterhouse and asked if the Council inspected slaughterhouses.

 

P O’Day replied that if slaughterhouses were registered, the responsibility for inspections lay with the Food Standards Agency, but if they weren’t registered, as was the situation in this case, the responsibility was Dacorum’s.  It was the same with meat processing plants, as they too should be registered with the Food Standards Agency.

 

Cllr Riddick asked how the hygiene routine would be controlled in a situation where two hotels in the Borough were using external marquees to cater for events, and the food was transported from a kitchen, rather than prepared within the marquees.

 

P O’Day replied it would be no different to serving bar meals in the beer garden, so the food hygiene would be controlled via the food hygiene control of the kitchen.  If premises such as hotels do weddings and conferences, the Council asks for the extent of the food operation.  The Council asks whether it involves a plate service via wheeled cabinets, whether they have a spirit burner, or whether they have other methods like distributed food stations.  Care homes for example might have various wings, produce food in one kitchen, and then distribute the food to the wings in heated cabinets.

 

When he first started working in food safety, one generally could get incidents of food poisoning from weddings and the like because the cooking and the cooling was quite poor.  However, everybody was more cautious these days, and much more production takes place offsite.  There was a time when one prepared chicken that one had to butcher the chicken itself to get to the chicken breast, whereas now one can get the chicken breast already cooked in a sauce, with all the preparation taken out.

 

Cllr Ransley enquired how one policed food hygiene at site-only woodland weddings, where the catering was done offsite and then brought to the woods. 

 

P O’Day replied that this would be no different to any outdoor catering event.  It would be no different for example to Chillfest, where a number of stalls use generators to provide the electricity or propane to provide the heat.  Many venues of this type might not do any washing up on site, as they put all the dirty dishes etc into a big container and take them offsite back to the function kitchens.  The Council would be looking at large trailers which include refrigerated and freezer storage that will run off the vehicle battery or a backup generator, as these vehicles were now so much better than they used to be.  The cooking and keeping cool side of things wasn’t too bad, but the problem tended to be water, as water was very heavy and took up much space.  Thus big festival caterers might have water butts and use chlorination tablets to keep the chlorine levels high. 

 

Cllr Ransley asked if the Council would inspect the food hygiene on a wedding day.

 

P O’Day confirmed that he was reasonably familiar with this type of operation and that with this kind of event it was usually left to the people whose wedding it was to organise the catering.  Sometimes it was left to the event organiser, and they would have a selection of caterers they would use.  The Council would advise them to check if the caterer is registered with the local authority, the caterer’s previous history, and so on. 

 

Cllr Harden queried where the liability lay between the operator and the local council, and, so long as the monitoring aspect of what the Council did was fulfilled, whether all the liability was on the business, leaving the Council solely responsible for enforcement.

 

P 0’Day said that he used this question for his research project in his graduate diploma in law.  Essentially the liability rested with the business.  However, as a public body the Council had some liability.  His research project was based on whether the local council would be liable if it didn’t take enforcement action in a situation where it inspected a food business, gave it a 0 or a 1 star rating, and then didn’t take enforcement action.  Liability would include financial considerations, so would be greater in cases where larger amounts of money was involved, for example high earning wealthy diners having to take time off as a result of obtaining food poisoning from an expensive restaurant.  This was one of the reasons why when the rating of a food premises falls below 3 stars, a peer review is undertaken to ensure the scoring is correct and that the appropriate action is taken. The Council was required by the Food Law Code of Practice to comply with legal requirements and recommendations, and has served a number of notices, or gone back and re-done inspections.  When a food business received a 0 or 1 star rating, the Council would take further action. 

 

Cllr Harden felt that the Council had performed well in dealing with food safety.

 

P O’Day replied that was because the Council employed some very competent officers.

 

The chairman reported as a long-serving member that he had kept an eye on the food safety inspections performance indicator over the years, and remembered a time when the Council had been able to carry out 100% of its food safety inspections.  However, the performance had been quite impaired on occasions when the Council had struggled to secure the resources required to carry out the work.  He asked for an update.

 

P O’Day said that the proportion of higher risk premises categorised A-C, which had been inspected, was the team’s key performance indicator.  In the last quarter the team had, as a result of hard work, achieved 100%.  But, one and a half posts remained empty, temporary staff came and went, and the management of resource levels had been challenging.

 

Cllr Fisher asked if the Council provided advice or guidance to the public on food safety.

 

P O’Day said the Council’s website carried a lot of advice, which generally replicated the advice from the Food Standards Agency.  The latter tended to run food safety campaigns to advise the public in the Summer to cook barbecue chicken all the way through, and at Christmas to cook the turkey all the way through.

 

Cllr Fisher queried what happened if someone hired a venue for their wedding and did the catering themselves.

 

P O’Day replied if somebody did the catering themselves that wouldn’t fall under the team’s remit, as it wouldn’t involve an undertaking.  It would purely be just a one-off.

 

Cllr Fisher asked if the venue would have any responsibility.

 

P O’Day replied that the venue would not have any responsibility.

 

Cllr Hicks asked if raw chicken packaging should be washed for recycling or binned with residual waste.

 

P O’Day said that the issue with raw chicken was an organism called campylobacter, and one needed only a tiny amount of it to become seriously ill.  It could last for nearly two weeks, was very painful, caused significant diarrhoea and was only good for losing weight.  He disposed of his raw meat packaging in the residual waste without washing, as there were so many different organisms in the residual waste anyway.

 

The chairman took the other view that so long as one took precautions, by using an anti-bacterial agent, one could wash this packaging for recycling, and make one’s wheelie bins spotless, but conceded this might involve too much effort for some.

 

D Austin commented that he was very pleased when Paul O’Day returned to Dacorum, as he was an exceptional officer, and introduced Russell Ham, who had taken on the Council’s Corporate Health, Safety & Resilience role.

 

The chairman said he was pleased to see the Council filling vacancies in key roles, as it had been struggling to secure these resources.

 

The chairman thanked P O’Day for the presentation and answering questions.

 

The chairman said that during the presentation, P O’Day had mentioned that when the Council took food safety legal action in court, the proceedings were held in public, so members could attend and see the Council at work.  This made the chairman think that it might be a good idea, resource permitting, to ask that all future public legal proceedings involving the Council are advertised to all members, as part of the weekly bulletin.  Members agreed, and the chairman agreed to ask Mark Brookes.