On Friday Southwark Council confirmed its Food Safety Business Plan for 2011-12.

Food poisoning can kill – lots of different horrible bugs, additives, etc. Ensuring the food chain in Southwark is good is critical to public health.

The strategy is to ensure the highest risk food manufacturers, shops, takeaways, etc are inspected at the MINIMUM recommended rate. Category C & D premises are takeaways, cafes and restaurants. It proposes that 324 of the 1102 Category C premises will be inspected at the MINIMUM rate of every 18 months. That ‘s around half the premises that should be inspected during the year. Category D premises should be inspected at least biannually but only 158/439 are planned to be visited. For Category E that should be inspected at least every 3 years 0 / 634 will be inspected. But the strategy does plan to visit all 301 unrated premises.

What’s really troubling is that without meeting at least the MINIMUM stated recommended inspection rate you can’t spot dodgy places that should be kept under closer more frequent inspection.

Inspection scores are made available via the wed – Scores on the Doors . Weirdly the strategy doesn’t promote the Apple of Android Apps that give very easy and GPS based access to these inspection ratings.

What feels odd though is that the Strategy also stated 12.5 council officers work in this arena. That should work out at around 2,600 available person days available per annum.

So why can’t they make at least the minimum recommended 1,796 inspections every year?