I would be most grateful if you could answer the following questions as a request under the Freedom of Information Act.

1. What is your Council’s policy for inspecting premises that serve food to the public such as bars, restaurants , hotels and takeaways in your area. Ie: How often do you aim to visit such premises to inspect food hygiene standards?
We follow the standard for risk assessment and interventions outlined in the Food Law Code of Practice: https://www.food.gov.uk/about-us/food-and-feed-codes-of-practice. During Covid we follow FSA Response to COVID-19 Board paper (17 June 2020) which describes the operational measures that were introduced by the FSA in relation to local authority official controls (Annex A, points 7-10). In addition, the Local Authority Recovery Roadmap (26 May 2021) Board paper set out the plan for recovery of local authority official controls.

2. For each calendar year for the past 3 years from Jan 2017 to present, please supply the following information in relation to Food Hygiene inspections:
a) How many such premises were/are licensed by your Council to serve food and were/are subject to food hygiene inspections by your Council.
We do not licence premises. Operators register their premises or request approval. Not all registered food businesses are subject to inspections; some may be subject to other interventions. At the current time we have 1136 food premises on our database.

Local Authority Enforcement Monitoring data held by the FSA contains historical data relating to number of premises:
https://data.food.gov.uk/catalog/datasets/
b) How many complaints did you receive from members of the public about licenced premises suspected of poor hygiene or causing food poisoning or the like?
2017: 144
2018: 139
2019: 118
2020: 91
2021: 113
c) How many routine food hygiene inspections did your authority carry out?
2017: 429
2018: 392
2019: 386
2020: 126
2021: 238
d) How many inspections were overdue compared to your policy in question 1?
We record the detail in financial year (April – March) and so can only answer in this format.
Inspection year 2017/18: zero inspections outstanding (Following COP)
Inspection year 2018/19: 81 inspections outstanding (Following COP)(Covid Pandemic affected the end of the 2018/19 inspection year
Inspection year 2019/20: zero classed as outstanding as following FSA recovery plan
Inspection year 2020/21: zero classed as outstanding as following FSA recovery plan
Inspection year 2021/22: this is current inspection year

3. As it stands today, 14th March 2022, for premises that are currently trading and were identified in Q1 (that are subject to food hygiene inspections in your Council’s area) how many have not been inspected for:
a) Over one year;
b) Over two years;
c) Over five years;
d) Over ten years.
e) Have never been inspected.
This information can be found in the published data contained on the FSA website and via the downloadable data sets:
https://ratings.food.gov.uk/default/en-GB
https://ratings.food.gov.uk/open-data/en-GB
f) For each of the five hygiene ratings awarded to premises (1 -5) how many premises were awarded each rating upon their last inspection?
Premises are awarded the hygiene ratings at all full or partial audits.