GREENWICH Council has apologised to a café in Greenwich after wrongly listing them as having failed to receive a Food Hygiene Award.
The owners of Baba’s Sandwich Bar in Greenwich South Street were shocked to see the listing on the council’s published listings, which was also included in a report on Greenwich.co.uk.
Mrs Bolsoy, who started the café 14 years ago with her husband, told Greenwich.co.uk:
“To say that we were furious seeing our business name listed as failed inspection,would be an understatement. I immediately contacted the Environmental Health department, who on investigating, realised there had been an error on their part. We have never failed an inspection in all the years we have been trading. We have a reputation of being very clean, not only with Environmental Health, but with our customers.”
Upon being made aware of the error, Greenwich Council told us:
“We would like to apologise to Baba’s sandwich bar and their customers for any confusion or distress that may have been caused as a result of an error on our website, which incorrectly listed Baba’s as not having a Food Hygiene Award.
It seems that there was an error in updating the information on the website relating to this particular establishment. Regular spot checks are carried out on our website in order to reduce the risk of errors like this taking place, but unfortunately this particular error was not caught by those checks.
Following an internal investigation the error has now been corrected on the website. We have written to Baba’s apologising and have also contacted them by telephone.”
The Food Hygiene Award is given to catering premises where an Enviornmental Health officer has decided that food is handled and prepared safely. Greenwich Council introduced its Food Safety Award scheme in 2004, with the results of inspections published on its website, and say they were the first borough to do so.
The council say they believe this is an “isolate case” and are reviewing their “procedures to ensure that standards of accuracy are maintained and any improvements identified as a result of this review will be acted on.”
It would be useful if the council used this opportunity to clarify the purpose of their food hygiene awards and to tell us all how they differ from a standard environmental health examination.
If, as Rob says above, the awards are given to premises where food is handled and prepared safely, why are those many, many establishments who have no award allowed to remain open? In short, do the food hygiene awards mean anything at all?
Seriously, if a coincil representative could clearly explain the significance of the award we would all know what levels of hygiene we’re dealing with. I have to admit, bearing in mind that none of the premises which fail the test have been asked to close, it seems meaningless to me – a bit like a gold star for being a good boy in class…