Food Safety

Advice, Guidance and Service Requests

Officers in the Food Team are readily available to offer advice to customers on food related issues. We also encourage our customers to take an active role in reporting food businesses, within the City of Westminster, that have poor food safety practices.

Throughout the year we receive such service requests from customers, and regularly carry out investigations into requests raised.

Service requests we investigate include:

• sightings of vermin or pests on food premises
• poor levels of cleanliness in kitchens, store rooms or preparation rooms
• poor food handling practices

If you have bought an item of food that you believe is contaminated in some way, we will also investigate your concerns. Some examples of things that we investigate include: 

• Foods containing foreign bodies (e.g., stones, glass, insects, hair, plasters, cigarette ends etc.)
• Food that is out of condition (e.g. mouldy, rotten, off-smelling etc)
• Food that is out of date (e.g. beyond its use by date)

We will only investigate complaints about food businesses, which relate to food safety. Our role is not to seek compensation and we cannot be involved in any financial aspect of the complaint.

We therefore cannot investigate complaints about the price of food, or poor customer service. Contact Westminster City Council Trading Standards with this type of complaint.

Anonymous requests

We accept anonymous requests, however we would rather you left a contact telephone number and we guarantee that your details are kept confidential. If you do leave your full details you may be asked to make a witness statement if your complaint results in legal action being taken against the premises.