Food safety law: the Acts and regulations that apply

How it fits together in a working kitchen

Think of the Food Safety Act 1990 as the roof and Regulation (EC) 852/2004 as the load-bearing wall beneath it. The Act sets the broad offences and the principle that food you serve must be safe and honestly described. The regulation turns that principle into day-to-day duties: hygienic premises, trained staff, temperature control, and a written system for managing hazards. The Food Safety and Hygiene (England) Regulations 2013 then hand your local authority the tools to enforce all of it.

The engine at the centre of that system is HACCP - Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points. Every food business in the UK, regardless of size or type, is legally required to have food safety management procedures based on HACCP principles. It is an offence not to have them. For most restaurants, cafes and takeaways, the practical route is the Food Standards Agency’s Safer Food, Better Business pack, which builds the same discipline around the four Cs: cross-contamination, cleaning, chilling and cooking. Keep it filled in, keep it current, and it doubles as your evidence.

Before any of that, there is registration. You must register your food business with the local authority, and you are expected to do so at least 28 days before you start trading. Registration is free and cannot be refused, but trading without it is itself an offence. Once you are open, the same authority will inspect you and award the Food Hygiene Rating that sits in your window and on the national portal.

Two duties are worth drawing out because they are so often underestimated. The first is people. Regulation (EC) 852/2004 requires food handlers to be supervised and instructed or trained in food hygiene matters appropriate to their work - a duty that bites hardest during busy periods when you are bringing new faces in quickly. If your headcount swells for the summer or the festive rush, it is worth having a plan to get seasonal staff up to speed on food safety fast so that training keeps pace with hiring rather than lagging behind it.

The second is labelling. Since Natasha’s Law came into force, food that is prepacked for direct sale must carry a full ingredients list with the 14 major allergens emphasised. It is a discrete piece of law with real consequences, and if you make sandwiches, salads or cakes to sell from your own counter it almost certainly applies to you. Our guide on what Natasha’s Law means for busy food businesses sets out the detail.

Now to the part that connects most directly to the state of your kitchen: premises. Annex II of Regulation (EC) 852/2004 is explicit that premises must be kept clean and in good repair, that ventilation must be adequate, and that food preparation areas must be designed and run to minimise air-borne contamination. In a commercial kitchen, the canopy, filters and extraction ductwork are exactly where that duty lands. Grease-laden vapour rises off the range, coats the ductwork and, left unattended, becomes both a contamination risk and a fire risk. An environmental health officer who finds a filthy, dripping canopy is not looking at a cosmetic problem - they are looking at a breach of the ventilation and cleanliness requirements the law sets out.

This is where the concept of due diligence matters. The law does not expect perfection; it expects you to take all reasonable precautions and exercise all due diligence to prevent an offence. Documented, scheduled cleaning - including your extraction system - is one of the clearest ways to show that you did. A dated certificate and a photographic record turn “we meant to” into “here is the evidence”, and that distinction is often what separates advice from a notice.

Taken together, these Acts and regulations are not a trap. They describe, in law, what a well-run kitchen already does: clean premises, sound systems, trained people, honest labelling and records that stand up to scrutiny. Meet the standard as a matter of routine and inspection day looks after itself.