Councils with the biggest inspection backlog.

Top 10 councils by premises awaiting inspection

FSA open data fetched 19 Oct 2026. Each council publishes its own extract; the date shown is that council’s extract date.

Highest share of the register awaiting

Councils with 1,000 or more establishments, so small registers don’t top the list by accident.

By region

Read this before quoting it

• “Awaiting inspection” is a backlog, not a count of new openings. It includes re-registrations after a change of owner and some premises that may not be trading yet.
• Scotland runs the Food Hygiene Information Scheme, where the status is “Awaiting Inspection”. We include it. Welsh files use the same FHRS status.
• Councils publish on different days, and some publish late. A big number can mean a big backlog, a big register, or a council that registers everything promptly. It is not a league table of council performance.
• We count what is published. We did not adjust, estimate or fill any gaps.

For context, the FSA reports that councils in England, Wales and Northern Ireland received 96,283 new food business registrations in 2024/25 (including re-registrations after a change of owner), and that about 39,000 establishments were still awaiting a first inspection in April 2025. Source: Food Standards Agency board paper FSA 25/09/04, Annual Local Authority Performance, food.gov.uk/board-papers/annual-local-authority-performance. Those FSA figures use a different scope and date from our count, so the two are not directly comparable.

Full method: how we count. Raw counts: inspection-backlog.json. Spotted an error? Tell us and we’ll fix it and note the change.

All councils

363 authorities. FSA open data fetched 19 Oct 2026.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Data: FSA open data fetched 19 Oct 2026. Not endorsed by the FSA.

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