Good idea – shame about the support

Last September, the Food Safety (General Food and Hygiene) Regulations 1995, which replaced the old food hygiene regulations and introduced some new requirements for us caterers, were officially one year old.

Since the end of that 12-month honeymoon period, during which time our environmental health officers were supposed to spend time giving us advice and guidance, they have begun cracking down - in some cases, with a vengeance.

Laudable

The principle on which the new rules are founded is laudable - to better look after the health of the nation. As a result, it is now a requirement for all food handlers to be supervised and trained in food hygiene "commensurate with their work activity".

However, in our experience this means not only sending staff on recognised courses of training, which we at the Cosmo have done, but also having to produce and publish an in-house information pack for each member of staff explaining all kinds of food hazards and how they could have an impact on the business and its customers.

With this in mind, HM Government has produced three colourful guides: on the general food hygiene regulations, on food hazards, and on general temperature controls.

An added burden is that we have also been issued with instructions on how to create our own guidelines, which we are told must be specifically applicable to the Cosmo, and must be handed to each member of staff.

We are not scared of hard work, but it strikes me that this ruling means that it is now not good enough to simply run a tidy, efficient, safe, hygienic catering establishment.

No, the first result of the new rules is that we have had to hone our expertise and understanding of a range of languages from Europe and further afield, as used by our diverse foreign staff members.

Second, in order to be able to communicate the new rules, it has been necessary to refine the rich English tongue into such a simple form that a sentence, however clear it may seem to me (an English-born Englishman), can be understood by a kitchen porter who has just arrived from Portugal and really comprehends only his mother tongue.

Take, for example, trying to explain in general the basic topic of what sorts of hazards there are. Just how does one effectively describe a micro-organism, and all the nasty things it can lead to, to someone not fluent in English?

The words of the Government's pamphlets just are not simple enough. Expressions such as "watch out for harmful bacteria, mould or foreign bodies present in/on food" are greeted so often with depressingly blank looks.

Even simpler

In reality, this has to be conveyed in an even simpler way if the instruction is to be effective. Repeat this operation for every other potential hazard, and you have a big task.

Third, in order to provide some easy-to-read handouts for our 20 or so staff, we have had to become aware of the intricacies of a number of computer programs and desktop publishing techniques, just to cut the cost of the exercise.

None of this, of course, is impossible. As a former journalist, I am a professional communicator who happens to be in the catering business. But this puts the wide-scale problem in a nutshell.

This environmental health requirement is another gleaming potential nail in the coffin of small private business. What is being demanded takes time - lots of it - and there are plenty of other things to do to run a successful restaurant and coffee bar and to grow a business.

Suffering

If your establishment is part of a chain of restaurants or cafés which are clearing big profits and can afford to hand all this important donkey work to an outside agency which specialises in internal communications, then all well and good. However, I am afraid there are too many regulations such as these which work in favour of corporate caterers but lead to the small independent businesses - and worse, the customers - suffering.

I really do believe that government, whatever its political hue, should always do more to help small, independent businesses. A good first step would be to think through the impact of rules and regulations, and then to provide the wherewithal to implement them - it should not simply expect us to go away and use the adult equivalent of sticky-backed plastic and egg boxes to construct the necessary tools.

There is a real and pressing need for the Government, not just the food industry, to clean up its act.