FIFE Council’s Environmental Health team – which is responsible for food hygiene and safety as well as workplace health and safety and other licensing duties – is not currently fulfilling all of its statutory obligations.

Fife Council health inspectors only carried out 956 of the 1126, or 85 per cent, programmed food safety inspections last year, Environment, Transportation and Climate Change scrutiny committee councillors were told.

“The combination of staff resource issues and findings on inspection has resulted in not all programmed food law inventions being carried out, along with challenges catching up on inspections paused due to the Covid19 Pandemic,” said Nigel Kerr, Fife’s head of Protective Services.

“Are we currently filling all our statutory roles? No, but we are engaging with Food Standards Scotland to ensure we continue to target the highest risk areas.”

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Mr Kerr told the committee that not all of Fife’s “medium or low risk” food manufacturing premises were inspected this year because “high risk” establishments had been given priority.

The Fife Environmental Health team considers food manufacturers “high risk” if they produce products like meat, dairy, and fish.

Other businesses that have had previous enforcement actions or food safety concerns are also in the “high risk” category. Exporters have also gotten special priority.

“Overall, protect services performing well considering the backdrop of vacancies and additional duties and we do strive to achieve, safe, healthy, clean and a fair trading environment for residents, business and visitors within Fife,” Mr Kerr said.

The biggest challenges are around the recruitment of food safety inspectors. In April 2023 it was reported that Fife’s Environmental Health team had a 20 per cent vacancy rate, and continued failure to recruit would have a “detrimental” impact on Fife public health.

Since then, Mr Kerr said the service has changed tact and developed a ‘Grow your own’ approach for its workforce, and despite what Mr Kerr called a “short term” dip in inspection performance, the service is actually making progress on its recruitment issues.

“There’s a shortage across Scotland for these roles,” Mr Kerr said .

“[We recognised] that we’re not going to fill them in the short term, so we are looking at a completely different model.”

The Environment Health team has brought on board a suite of trainees and modern apprentices, and they are helping those new starters to become qualified food safety inspectors.

Two previous trainees have already gone on to become qualified inspectors with the council, and there are two more trainees in the pipeline.

The council has also been training technicians to do interventions and inspections on their own at low risk premises to leave capacity for qualified food safety officers to focus on higher level things. “I think we need to recognise that there will invariably be a short term dip in performance, but we’re looking for medium and long term gains through grow your own staff,” Mr Kerr said.