On food safety and the decline of the generalist EHO

Food safety inspection is on the verge of a step change that may greatly reduce the responsibilities and autonomy of local authority environmental health services. Will Hatchett speaks up for the role of the professional judgment and integrity offered by environmental health officers (EHOs) and warns against dumbed-down, tick-box enforcement.

In 2017, I watched, over a couple of weeks, as the library of the Chartered Institute of Environmental Health was loaded into skips for off-site disposal. Decades of policy papers, technical reports and books on subjects ranging from identifying sea fish and exotic fruit and vegetables to drains, clean air and slum clearance were sent to landfill.

It was an economy measure – perhaps a short-sighted one – necessitated by huge financial losses and a radical downsizing. I had often used the library as editor of the CIEH's news magazine. The move seemed symbolic of the reduced status of environmental health's holistic, local authority-based heritage, stretching back to the Public Health Acts of 1848 and 1875.

This professional erosion continues. According to a CIEH workforce survey in 2021, 56% of councils had environmental health vacancies unfilled for more than six months; 87% said agency staff were needed because they could not recruit permanent staff. A Local Government Association capacity survey in 2024 found that 51% of the workforce is over 50, while only 9% is under 30, creating a significant retirement 'cliff edge'.

In the same year, the Food Standards Agency expressed concern that around one in seven food safety posts in England, Wales and Northern Ireland were vacant.

Response to skills shortages

One could conclude from this that council-based environmental health is dying – literally – as a branch of the public health workforce. The trend is not new. University environmental health degrees have been closing for years, while comparatively poor terms and conditions and limited post-Covid flexibility have made local government less attractive to graduates.

The decline of the EHO as the person who inspects the kitchen of your local restaurant may have been accelerated last year by two significant developments. In October 2025, responding to an escalating crisis in food safety inspection capacity, the FSA introduced a revised Food Law Code of Practice (CoP) and accompanying practice guidance. The CoP is the FSA's legal blueprint for how local authorities regulate food businesses.

The revised CoP brought the Business Risk Decision Model (BRDM) into force in England, replacing the previous inspection regime with a more flexible, intelligence-led and risk-based approach to food hygiene controls. Moving away from a rigid 28-day inspection target, local authorities can now triage new food business registrations. This allows immediate inspections to focus on higher-risk establishments.

The new code formalises the use of remote official controls, such as desktop reviews and remote assessments, and allows trained officers with lower-level qualifications than previously required to undertake more regulatory work.
Currently, a fully qualified EHO typically has a Level 6 honours degree requiring three or more years of study and additional professional training. The CIEH has agreed, in principle, with the FSA on the development of a new Level 5 qualification for food law enforcement to broaden the regulatory workforce. It will be approximately equivalent to a Foundation Degree or Higher National Diploma, although the curriculum and assessment have yet to be finalised.

Level 4-qualified food safety practitioners, who can be trained in a matter of weeks, are now able to undertake supporting regulatory activities, including the desktop assessment of newly registered food businesses.

Critics argue that the changes risk diluting professional expertise, while supporters say they are a pragmatic response to severe workforce shortages. Both the CIEH and the FSA support a 'permit to trade' for new food businesses and the mandatory display of Food Hygiene Rating Scheme scores for food businesses in England, as in the rest of the UK. These long overdue measures would certainly help the FSA to fulfil its mission to “protect public health and maintain consumer confidence in the food system”.

Surprise announcement

In November 2025, in an unexpected move, the Government invited the FSA, through the Budget, to develop "a consistent, national approach in England for the regulation of large food businesses".

The idea did not emerge overnight. The FSA introduced Primary Authority partnerships in 2009, allowing large multi-site food businesses to work with a single local authority acting as their central regulatory contact. In 2023 it piloted National Level Regulation (NLR), under which major retailers would be regulated centrally through scrutiny of their systems and data.

The largest retailers have already begun preparing for such a system, developing national digital dashboards capable of sharing refrigeration records, staff training and pest control data directly with the FSA.

To supporters, NLR is the logical next step in modern, risk-based regulation. To many EHOs, it represents a profound constitutional shift: the weakening of politically accountable local authority enforcement, the further decline of the generalist EHO and an increased risk of regulatory capture. Unlike BRDM, however, NLR remains a proposal. It will require further design, consultation and primary legislation.

Many questions remain unanswered. We do not know how many businesses will qualify for NLR, how the scheme will be funded, or whether the FSA rather than councils will ultimately prosecute serious offences. Such powers would not be unprecedented – the Financial Conduct Authority and the Health and Safety Executive both combine regulatory and enforcement functions – but they would mark a significant departure from the current system.

New government – new priorities

Established in 2000 following the BSE crisis and the 1996 E. coli O157 outbreak in Lanarkshire, the FSA, now led by its sixth chief executive, Katie Pettifer, is a political creation. Its independence and transparency were originally badges of honour after the failure of MAFF's in-house advice during the BSE crisis.

In 2010, perceived as too political and too large, it lost its responsibilities for nutrition policy to the DoH and food labelling to Defra. Following years of budget cuts greatly reducing its staff count, the agency has increasingly become a technical and managerial organisation, rather than a public champion.

Since Brexit and Covid, new priorities have emerged: maintaining food security and reducing regulatory burdens on businesses facing rising costs. These are now objectives of the Labour Government and are likely to outlast it.

The prospect of political continuity, together with last year's Budget request to streamline regulation for large businesses, have led the FSA to combine the new CoP and BRDM with National Level Regulation under its all-embracing Future of Food Regulation Programme.

In March, the programme was presented to the FSA Board as a ‘step change’ towards a flexible, risk-based and modern food regulatory system, recognising the “evolving food landscape and the persistent pressures on local authority delivery”. FSA Chair, Susan Jebb, endorsed the programme and instructed officials to proceed with detailed design.

In June, the FSA published a workplan integrating National Level Regulation with improved local regulation, stressing that local authorities must remain part of the solution. Mid-2027 is the deadline for post-Brexit dynamic alignment negotiations. The FSA must keep one eye on the EU if it is to fulfil its Budget brief while reducing unnecessary burdens on internationally trading food businesses.

Risks versus benefits

If fully implemented, these reforms will represent the biggest structural change in food regulation since the Food Standards Agency was created. Many of the underlying ideas – including licensing, earned recognition and national regulation – have been discussed for years. An earlier modernisation programme, Regulating Our Future, launched in 2016, was derailed by Covid.

But deepening austerity, workforce shortages and a new political climate have accelerated what might otherwise have been gradual evolution into something closer to revolution.

The issues at stake are not professional self-interest or nostalgia but trust, integrity and accountability. Most professionals concede that incorporating advanced data collection and AI into official controls is welcome, but many argue that virtual assessments and documentary assurances cannot entirely replace an experienced professional visiting premises.

The keenest eyes are often those of the generalist rather than the contractor working to a narrowly defined specification. Sceptics fear that EH in the public sector will continue to be seriously underfunded. They portray a future of dumbed-down, tick-box enforcement, increased outsourcing and over-reliance on third-party auditors.

The strength of environmental health has never simply been technical competence in food hygiene. Its distinctive contribution has been its breadth. An officer inspecting a restaurant may also understand housing, infectious disease, occupational health, air quality, noise, drainage and wider public health.

Expertise, independence and thoroughness have long characterised the environmental health profession. It is bound by a code of ethics, and its practitioners are motivated by more than commercial considerations. Whatever shape the future regulatory system takes, those qualities are surely worth preserving.


 

Renters’ rights – logical evolution or ‘mutant layer cake’?

This year could stand as a watershed in post-war housing policy on rented housing, moving towards a fairer, healthier sector. But that’s not a given. The reforms add hard-to-interpret additions to already complex law and impose multiple new duties on cash-strapped councils. Will Hatchett reflects

A national conference, RHE Global’s Housing 2026, could not have been more topical. The event was well-timed because the Renters’ Rights Act, which will give private rented sector tenants greater security of tenure in England and aims to improve the often below standard conditions in which they live, is now close to coming into force.

It could come to be seen as a milestone in a policy area that has yo-yoed between the ideologies of the two major parties since 1945. But only if it succeeds.

The act will be deemed successful if it protects tenants and improves housing standards while not causing the landlords’ flight from the private rented sector that has been warned of by their representative bodies. If those things are the case, the RRA will enjoy longevity and attract bi-partisan support. 

Failure could be, well – very bad. The UK has created a toxic tenure pattern under successive governments – increasingly inaccessible owner occupation, vestigial social renting and expensive and insecure private renting. If small landlords do leave the PRS en masse, because of the act, already stretched services could be overwhelmed by homelessness. Meanwhile, lower-tier tribunals already clogged with work could buckle under the weight of new cases, leading to even lengthier and expensive delays both for landlord and tenants.
There is a great deal at stake.

End of no-fault eviction

Let’s not be pessimistic or apocalyptic. The abolition of no-fault eviction for controlled tenancies has been long fought for and almost universally welcomed. Lobbyists have sought, in England, a central register or database of landlords for decades; we now have one – and it could provide a gateway, ultimately, to a passport-style system of landlord licensing. Housing campaigner Kwajo Twenoboa reminded the conference that you need a licence to drive a car, but not to be a landlord and he pointed out: “It’s easier to become a landlord than to open a chicken shop”.

The act contains a welcome duty to enforce (with the caveat that imposing a civil penalty of £7000 on an otherwise co-operative landlord simply for not producing a document by a required date could be counter-productive). 

Speaker Linda Selvy-Cobb, principal manager of DASH Services, welcomed the profile that the RRA has given to housing enforcement within local authorities. But awareness of the act among landlords, tenants and the general public is low. The Government has not seen fit to publicise the new law very widely, putting the onus on councils to do so.

There are also loopholes. Lettings agents – currently gate keepers for the most vulnerable – remain in a shocking void of unaccountability. The worst are deaf to tenants’ concerns and, through negligence, can incur life-changing penalties and liabilities for landlords.

The new legislation has introduced a welcome ombudsman for private tenants, but the service fails to cover tenants in temporary accommodation in the PRS. Both failings could be corrected by secondary legislation or private member’s’ bills. 

Need for regulatory discretion

Critics of the RRA point out that, from 1 May, EHOs will have powers to award significant civil penalties to landlords, while the legal underpinnings of the act will only just have come into force. Some landlords are going to say: “I didn’t know anything about this”. The National Residential Landlords Association called for at least six months of preparation time between the publishing of final regulations and the law coming into force. The measure was not adopted. In the absence of a period of grace, it will be up to councils to educate and motivate landlords and to enforce fairly, to avoid accusations of ‘penalty farming’. 

Older EHOs will remember New Labour’s Enforcement Concordat of 1998 and the Regulators’ Compliance Code of 2008. Both urged a ‘light touch’ and the use of enforcement only as a last resort. They may wonder how this aligns with RRA’s duty to enforce. 

Legal expert and former head of public protection and strategic director, Tim Everett, reminded delegates that there are fashions in enforcement culture. He said that stretched resources mean that a light touch would now be regarded an unaffordable luxury by most local authorities. He urged councils to adopt a single enforcement policy covering all of their regulatory services, as the best way to avoid successful challenges in courts and lower-tier tribunals.

Bonanza for lawyers

In designing a rational housing system, no-one would start from where we are now. Conference speaker Suzanne Smith, a small landlord and legal expert who has written a lay person’s guide to the RRA, aptly described housing law as a “mutant layer cake”. Successive governments have alternately stripped away or added protections for tenants.

Those adding them have not repealed previous law (limited Parliamentary time and five-year Parliamentary terms don’t allow that). Consequently, we now have the RRA while sections of the Protection of Eviction Act of 1977 and the Housing Acts of 1985, 1988 and 2004 remain in force; legal remedies are available through civil penalties, lower-tier tribunals and county courts. It’s a mess.

The result is that no-one feels on secure ground when defending their legal rights. It’s a bonanza for housing lawyers, ambulance chasing solicitors and pop-up legal ‘experts’ promising fortunes to new entrants to the rental property market if they pay for expensive advice.

On the other hand, extensive evidence bases, the science of risk-assessment and AI-assisted algorithms were not significant factors in drawing up previous watershed acts affecting PRS tenants, in 1957, 1965 and 1988.

This underpinning could help to make the RRA robust and long-lasting, as could the government’s policy objective to bring the totality of rented housing under a common framework of standards, protections and rules, over the next decade. 

Goal of tenure neutrality

Given the history of housing legislation, it is perhaps surprising that the RRA is as coherent as it is. Luke Spanton, head of cross-tenure standards at MHCLG, who spoke at RHE Housing 2026, was a local authority EHO earlier in his professional life. Unusually for a senior civil servant, he understands the ‘sharp end’ – the blend of legal knowledge, nous and pragmatism that make for effective enforcement. This has been reflected in the detail of the legislation and the way that it has been created with the close involvement of practitioners, including RHE Global being commissioned to carry out a major review of the Housing Health and Safety Rating System.

The ambition of the 2026 housing reforms is far-sighted. Underlying the RRA, the Decade of Renewal for social housing, reissued in January, Awaab’s Law, the HHSRS and the new Decency Standard is a desire to move towards a tenure-neutral rented sector, more akin to a European housing system than the UK’s, which, in recent decades, has prioritised the financial well-being of owner occupiers over affordable and secure housing for all. The year 2035, when the Decency Standard will be enforceable in the PRS as well the social rented sector is not an end point, but a way marker towards that ideal.

A mature rented sector would ensure properties covering a spectrum of rent levels. The greatest protection would be in the parts of the sector catering for those with the least choice and the least social and financial capital. That would be the opposite of what we have now – a system in which London councils are spending £5.5 million per day on temporary accommodation and around 1.3 million people are on social housing waiting lists. 

Will we get there? Speakers at RHE Housing 2026, commenting at the event’s closing roundtable, were loath to make prophecies. They agreed that we won’t know for a decade or so – hopefully by the time of RHE Housing 2036.

Will Hatchett has been a journalist since 1986 specialising in local government. He was editor of Environmental Health News from 1998 until 2018. The views expressed here are purely his own.