Environmental health Staffing/enforcement
Case reference FOI2026/01144
Received 13 May 2026
Published 1 June 2026
Request
I hope you are well. I am writing to request information under the Freedom of Information Act 2000 relating to environmental health in your local authority. The information requested is as follows:
1. Staffing:
1.1: Number of full-time equivalent (FTE) staff (including, if possible, agency or contractor staff working in equivalent roles) in your environmental health dept, unit or team in 2019/20 and 2025/26.
1.2. Of the total FTE in your environmental health team, please indicate, for both 2019/20 and 2025/26, the approximate FTE allocated to the following functions: • Food hygiene/food standards inspections and enforcement • Pest control • Infectious disease control (including outbreak investigation, liaison with health protection bodies, etc.) Note: I appreciate that some staff work across multiple areas. Where possible please apportion their FTE by time spent (e.g. a 1.0 FTE officer spending half their time on food safety and half on housing should be counted as 0.5 in each category). If exact data is not held, please provide the best available estimate used for internal planning, monitoring or statutory reporting - rather than create a new data set.
2. Businesses:
2.1: Number of food businesses (including restaurants and takeaways) registered in the local authority in 2019/20 and 2025/26.
2.2: Number of food businesses (including restaurants and takeaways) inspected in 2019/20 and 2025/26.
2.3: Number of registered food businesses that are eligible for inspection, but which have never been inspected.
2.4: Number of food businesses (including restaurants and takeaways) that failed inspections in 2019/20 and 2025/26.
2.5: Number of enforcement visits to food businesses in the local authority in 2019/20 and 2025/26.
2.6: Number of incidents involving pests (vermin, insects etc) at food businesses in 2019/20 and 2025/26.
2.7: Number of closures of food businesses in 2019/20 and 2025/26 due to enforcement action through a Hygiene Emergency Prohibition Notice.
2.8: Number of prosecutions of food businesses in 2019/20 and 2025/26.
Response
A: The information requested in question 2.6 is not held in a form that would enable it to be located, retrieved and extracted within the Appropriate Time Limit which equates to 18 hours as defined by the Freedom of Information and Data Protection (Appropriate Limits and Fees) Regulations 2004.
Our electronic reporting systems are unable to run a report for this information. To ascertain the data requested officers would need to manually check every intervention Herefordshire Council dealt with at each premises through the course of a year to see if there were pests incidents. An initial search has shown that there would be around 2,000 records to view individually, and it is estimated that it would take 3 minutes to check each file.
This would at a conservative estimate take at least 100 hours to complete. Where the Limit is exceeded Public Authorities are not obliged to supply the information requested by virtue of S12 of the Act. Please take this letter as a refusal notice under S17 of the Act.
Documents
This is Herefordshire Council's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
You can browse our other responses or make a new FOI request.