Food Safety - Regulations

New hygiene laws

From 1 January 2006 new European Food Hygiene laws came into force which affect all food businesses.

The regulations which will affect owners of food businesses are as follows.

• Regulation 852/2004 (applies to all food businesses)
• Regulation 853/2004 (applies to businesses requiring approval)
• The Food Hygiene (England) Regulations 2006

These will replace the existing food hygiene and temperature control regulations.

Most of the law remains unchanged in terms of the structural and hygiene requirements.

Hazard analysis

Since 1995 there has been a requirement for businesses to carry out hazard analysis in order to identify what can go wrong in terms of food safety and to put measures in place to control those hazards. The new regulation goes a step further and requires all food businesses to have in place a permanent procedure based on HACCP (Hazard Analysis Critical Control Point) principles.

This means that food businesses will need to be able to demonstrate to us, as the enforcement authority, that they are controlling the risks associated with their business by having a procedure in place. The level of documentation required will be dependent on the nature and size of the business.

Our enforcement approach to the new regulations will be graduated and educative. This means that we intend to work with businesses to achieve compliance.

Where we find contraventions which pose a food safety risk to the public we will still use enforcement action (letters, notices, prosecution).

We will assess your level of compliance at the next programmed inspection.

Related information

Approval of food premises

A small number of businesses will require approval rather than registration. This tends to affect businesses which handle products of animal origin (meat ,poultry, fish, eggs) and don't just trade locally. If you think your business may require approval please contact the Food Safety team for advice as the criteria for approval are quite detailed and specific.

More information

There is a lot of useful information for businesses on the Food Standards Agency website.

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