The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has published an evaluation of its National Inspection Strategies’ (NIS) work and draft standards that local authorities and business partnerships will have to meet if they wish to have a NIS for food hygiene recognised by the FSA.
NIS involves one local authority – called the primary authority – working with a multi-site food business to ensure the business is meeting its food hygiene responsibilities through assessment of its central systems and other business data. The primary authority will use this intelligence to inform the frequency and nature of local authority inspections of individual outlets.
In a NIS recognised by the FSA, routine inspections of individual outlets by local authorities will be less frequent than now and, most importantly, the findings from those inspections will be fed back to the primary authority to provide assurance that the NIS is working as intended.
The pathfinder trial published by the FSA looked at whether primary authorities can access and use business data to predict how businesses are complying with hygiene regulations. The FSA found and 80% match between the predicted food hygiene ratings based on a food business’ data and the actual rating given by an LA following an inspection.