We have been informed by Glenis Wilmott, head of the European Labour Party that the regulation and potentially the exemption for SME businesses is now up for debate by the Council of Ministers befpre being agreed. We have been led to believe that their is no guarantee that we will keep our exemption from inspection charging for food hygiene visits which could cost individual nusinesses hundreds of pounds per year. We do not believe that these charges will be spent on enforcement but instead go to fill holes in local authority finances making this an additional charge which small businesses can ill afford. If you own, run or work for a small or medium sized enterprise or if you want to help keep independent food businesses - in business. Then please sign the petition and leave a comment for the government. These changes could reduce the number of small businesses opening, reduce the diversity of choice for consumers and not resolve the very real problem of environmental health services being stretched to capacity.

The European Parliament supporteed the exemption for SME's now we ask the council of ministers to do the same.

Please see the message below from the original petition run in April 2014 which successfully got the exemption re-instated - for the time being at least.

On Monday the 14th of April MEP’s will be voting on the proposed changes to EU regulation 882/2004 which governs official controls in the food  and agricultural industry.  One of these changes will require all local authorities to recoup the full cost of food hygiene inspections direct from the businesses.  This means each business will be required to retrospectively pay for the time and costs incurred by Environmental Health Officers (EHO’s) for any initial and subsequent inspections.  

For any food business this could mean hundreds or even thousands of pounds a year but for event caterers, market traders, street food retailers and pop up retailers this could be significantly higher. The reason for this is that caterers can undergo up to 20 environmental health inspections a year throughout the events season. This will potentially cost small and start-up businesses thousands of pounds that they simply can't afford. 

 Imagine paying for every inspection!

 We are calling for MEP’s  & MP’s to fight our fight and protect the small businesses who are vital to economic growth.

Please sign your name below to help put pressure on the government.