Minutes:
“The Environment Overview and Scrutiny Committee meeting in June, when discussing the Food Safety annual report, agreed that ‘Members are concerned about the tightness of staffing and the potential risk to the public from not having a full complement of staff in the area and ask Cabinet to review the situation.
What decision has Cabinet come to?”
Answer
Councillor F.Thomson (Executive Member, Governance, Public Health and Climate Change) answered:-
“The work of the Public Health and Protection Service is considerably broad with the underlying theme of protecting the public and one such function is food safety. Within this role, local authorities are expected to not just merely undertake “routine hygiene inspections”, they are also expected to operate a risk based enforcement system that values educational initiatives together with formal legal enforcement tools and ‘non inspection interventions’ for example targeted sampling, imported food controls, investigation of food poisoning outbreaks and investigating complaints about food businesses or food products.
All food safety officers who undertake any of these tasks have to be suitably qualified and competent to do so. The Food Standards Agency set out the required criteria that we must follow and local authorities can be audited against this standard. It is therefore essential that when we recruit into these posts we recruit only those applicants who are suitably qualified, as detailed by the Food Standards Agency.
The Council is aware of the challenges faced when recruiting into these posts. However I would like to point out that this is a national problem and not one just limited to Welwyn Hatfield or indeed Hertfordshire. We continue to work with our Human Resources team to ensure our job adverts reach the widest range of our target audience but there is often very limited numbers of suitably qualified applicants available.
The Environmental Health team currently have one vacancy for an Environmental Health Officer and we are working with Human Resources in respect of the recruitment process. Once we have recruited into that post, the team should have adequate resources to deliver risk based food safety interventions. However, the team are busy preparing for Brexit and as such we are evaluating our food safety resources, bearing in mind the uncertainties around different Brexit scenarios.
The team are also aware of a new national Environmental Health apprenticeship scheme which is being finalised and this may assist in contingency planning for these roles. Hopefully this is something that we can bring to Welwyn Hatfield in the near future to complement the Council’s existing apprenticeship scheme.
Given the workload of the team and preparations for Brexit I do not think asking staff to make extra reports to Cabinet is a worthwhile use of resources at this time.”
Councillor Cowan in a supplementary question said that this added weight to concern as to how well covered we are if someone leaves and asked what is being done – nothing at all?
Councillor Thomson replied that we were currently recruiting and looking at the apprenticeship scheme. We were on target for inspections and re-visits and Councillor Thomson publicly thanked the Officers for their hard work.