The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has launched a new national food hygiene rating scheme which builds upon the Scores on the Doors scheme and is designed to help people choose the safest places to eat out or do their food shopping.
The scheme aims to try and reduce the one million cases of food poisoning suffered by people each year.
The new FHRS scheme assesses the hygiene standards at all places where people can eat or buy food, including:
- restaurants
- hotels
- cafés
- takeaways
- pubs
- supermarkets
The stars displayed by outlets in the Scores on the Doors system have been replaced with numbers. The FSA had commissioned independent research that showed that consumers found these easier to understand
The new scheme based upon inspections by local council food safety officers, rates premises on a scale ranging from zero at the bottom to a top rating of five as shown below.
Bright green and black stickers will be used to display the new scores by premises.
The FSA hopes that the new scheme, which requires all local authorities to use the same methodology and branding and has a single website for all scores in England and Wales, will make life easier for both businesses and consumers. But it admitted that it cannot force local authorities to move on to the new system. Local councils must decide whether to join the voluntary system. Council food safety officers will then inspect venues and award a rating.
The FHRS has already been adopted by about 80 local authorities, including all 22 in Wales and the FSA expects around 170 local authorities to take up the scheme by June 2011
A new rating is given each time the business is inspected by a food safety officer from the local authority where the business is located.
A snapshot survey, recently carried out for the FSA, indicated that more than eight in 10 members of the public (86%) consider hygiene standards to be extremely important when eating out, significantly outweighing other considerations such as price and location. At least a fifth of people questioned said that they had, when eating out, sent food back for hygiene-related reasons, such as undercooked poultry (23%) and dirty plates (22%), increasing to around one in three who reported sending back undercooked meat (29%).
Ratings are available for anyone to view at www.food.gov.uk/ratings.
Jeff Rooker, Chair of the FSA, said “Many people suffer from food poisoning every year, but we shouldn’t feel we are gambling with our health when we eat out. In developing this scheme, we wanted to give people the ability to judge for themselves whether they considered the hygiene standards of a food outlet to be good enough. If customers are looking for a hygiene rating, this will drive businesses to improve their standards”
