Pests and Your Hygiene Rating

The three scores

Where Pests Actually Land

A Food Hygiene Rating is built from three separate assessments, and pests touch two of them hard.

Hygienic food handling — preparation, cooking, cooling, storage. Pests reach this if there is evidence of contamination of food or food contact surfaces.

Cleanliness and condition of the premises — the building, layout, ventilation, and the condition of the fabric. Evidence of pest activity, and the gaps and defects that let them in, land squarely here.

Management of food safety — your systems, your records, and whether you can demonstrate they work. This is the one that surprises people, because it is scored on documentation, and it is the one where a good pest control record does the most work for you.

That third score is also the one that most often drags a rating down. A clean kitchen with no paperwork can score worse than an imperfect kitchen with excellent records, because the inspector can verify the second and has to take the first on trust.

What an inspector looks for

Evidence, Not Absence

A town-centre kitchen with a yard and a bin store will get pest pressure. Everybody knows that, including the inspector. What is being assessed is your response.

What helps:

• A current contract or a record of visits, with dates.
• Reports that say what was found and where, rather than "no activity" on a pre-printed sheet.
• Evidence you acted on recommendations. A report recommending three pipe entries be sealed, and an invoice showing they were, is worth more than either on its own.
• A site plan with monitoring points marked.
• Your own records between visits — a sightings log, and what you did about each one.

What hurts: evidence of activity with no record of anybody knowing about it. That is the finding that moves a rating, because it goes to management rather than to housekeeping.

The recurring findings

Where It Usually Comes From

Across food premises the same short list produces most of it, and almost none of it is the kitchen itself.

• The bin store — shelter, a permanent food supply and a door staff use all day.
• The yard — stacked pallets, an unused skip, a chamber with a broken cover.
• Drainage, especially where grease has narrowed the bore and holds solids.
• Deliveries — cardboard is the commonest way cockroaches arrive anywhere.
• Propped doors and failed fly screens, which are worse than no screen because everyone assumes they work.
• Voids and ducting in a parade or a converted building, which is how a neighbour's problem becomes yours.

If you get a finding

What to Do in the First Week

Act, and record that you acted. In that order, and quickly, because the rating can be reassessed.

• Get it inspected properly and get a written report, including the building defects rather than just the activity.
• Do the proofing. This is the part that demonstrates a change rather than a clean-up.
• Write down the sequence: the finding, the date you acted, what was done, what remains and when it is scheduled.
• Change the thing that caused it. If the bin area was the source, the bin regime has to change, and that has to be visible in your records.

You can usually request a re-visit once you have addressed the points, and in England you can also ask for the right of reply to be published alongside the rating. Both are worth doing.

We can attend out of hours so the premises keep trading, and the written record is part of the work rather than an extra.

Short answers

Drain Blocker Questions

Going further

Drain and Rat Guides