These data provide the food hygiene rating or inspection result given to a business and reflect the standards of food hygiene found on the date of inspection or visit by the local authority. Businesses include restaurants, pubs, cafés, takeaways, hotels and other places consumers eat, as well as supermarkets and other food shops. Although the source data is freely available as open data, a process of cleaning, correcting and normalisation has taken place to produce this unique, high quality presentation of FHRS ratings and food services businesses in the UK.
Weekly snapshots of active ratings or inspection results for businesses are provided back to 2012. The current snapshot is up to April 2023.
The data are held on behalf of local authorities participating in either the Food Standards Agencies:
National Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS) in England, Northern Ireland and Wales
Food Hygiene Information Scheme (FHIS) in Scotland
Data are only available for local authority areas running either of these schemes.
Content
All files are zipped CSVs or in Parquet format. For an overview of the characteristics of the data, see the Data Summary, downloadable below. Note that given the file sizes the inspection data, supply date of ratings, the business information and location are split across different files and must be combined and split for time series analysis.
Quality, Representation and Bias
All local authorities have content with the FHRS data. Discrepancies in dates may be seen due to local authority reporting procedures. The "date of opening" for example, can sometimes not match the actual opening date, and is the date that an opening was first reported by a local authority. Earliest inspection dates can be before this, suggesting the date of opening in these cases is inaccurate - and the earliest inspection date should be used (although inspections data was not published prior 2012).
COVID-related lockdowns have also created some issues in the time series which users should be aware of. Some premises have been given virtual inspections which can further affect date accuracy. These are noticeable between Q2 2020 and Q1 2021 where update activity recorded was reduced. The data supply date indicates the business was on the FSA register at that date.
In some areas, premises disappear for periods and then can re-appear. As the premises have not shut, we cannot explain this. If a premise is closed for refurbishment, it gets removed from the supply, then re-added when it re-opens. This is likely due to re-inspection. Similarly, if a premise is taken over. If it is a new legal entity, it will be a change of ownership and may be allocated a new ID. The history of ratings as we supply is the complete set captured from the Food Standards Agency.
