When Environmental Health will get involved
The Environmental Health Service deals with food complaints that pose a public health threat. It does not get involved in compensation claims.
Compensation claims are a civil matter that you must take up with the manufacturer and courts.
Environmental Health will deal with:
- unfit food, like decomposing meat
- food poisoning
- food that’s so contaminated you could not expect someone to eat it, like heavy mould growth on cheese
- food which contains something that should not be there, like a piece of metal in a loaf of bread
What Environmental Health will do
The time it takes to investigate food complaints varies. We often have to contact the manufacturer to give them an opportunity to tell us what happened.
We often ask the manufacturer’s local Environmental Health Officer to give us information about them.
We may ask a representative from the manufacturer to visit our offices. If the problem was because of poor temperature control, storage or handling in a Brighton & Hove premises, we’ll visit them.
This can take a while but as soon as we receive the article we will start the investigation within 24 hours.
We’ll update you on the progress at least once every 28 days. At the end of the investigation we’ll tell you the outcome in writing.
If you need any information about your complaint, please contact the Environmental Health team.