Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, which local authorities in England publish on their websites (a) the names and addresses of individuals and businesses convicted under the Food Hygiene (England) Regulations 2006, (b) details of the offences for which those individuals and businesses were convicted and (c) the penalty levied by the courts in each such case.

The information requested is not held centrally.

The Food Standards Agency (FSA) has confirmed that local authorities routinely issue press releases with details of the prosecutions that they take. Local authorities also provide details of the number of United Kingdom establishments prosecuted as part of their annual monitoring returns to the FSA. Based on these returns, 271 establishments in England were prosecuted for food hygiene offences during the period April 2012 and March 2013. The FSA publishes information on enforcement activity by individual local authorities, including the number of prosecutions taken, on an annual basis. This is available on the FSA website at:

www.food.gov.uk/enforcement/monitoring/laems/mondatabyyear/

The data for 2013-14 is not yet available.

Consumers can obtain information about hygiene standards in local food businesses from the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme website at:

http://ratings.food.gov.uk/