Every food business in the UK that the public can buy from gets inspected, and in England, Wales and Northern Ireland that inspection produces a rating from 0 to 5 under the Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS). One café, one rating, not very interesting on its own. But add those scores up across a whole local authority and you start to see the shape of a place — how its restaurants, takeaways, school kitchens and corner shops are doing as a group.
That's the story here. Below we celebrate the local authorities with the highest proportion of businesses rated 5 ("very good"), then look honestly at the lower end. One thing to hold in your head before we start: a rating reflects the last inspection, not the taste of the food, and it can change at the next visit. We're not affiliated with the Food Standards Agency — we just present its open data in a friendlier shape than a spreadsheet.
A quick word on the figures. These cover FHRS areas with at least 300 rated businesses, so the percentages aren't being thrown off by some tiny district where a single closure swings the numbers. Scotland is excluded because it runs a different scheme — Pass / Improvement Required — rather than the 0–5 scale, so it can't be compared like for like. If that distinction is new to you, our guide on FHRS vs FHIS explains how the two systems differ.
The cleanest local authorities
These six areas have the highest share of businesses holding a top mark of 5 out of 5.
- Wrexham (Wales) — 93.2% rated 5, average rating 4.94. The clear leader, with well over nine in ten premises at the top mark.
- Thanet (England) — 90.9% rated 5, average 4.93. A strong showing for this Kent coastal district.
- Bassetlaw (England) — 89.8% rated 5, average 4.96. Notably, Bassetlaw has the highest average rating of any area here at 4.96.
- Anglesey (Wales) — 89.5% rated 5, average 4.84.
- North Kesteven (England) — 88.1% rated 5, average 4.92.
- Ipswich (England) — 88% rated 5, average 4.93.
It's worth pausing on what those numbers actually feel like on the ground. In Wrexham, if you wander into a café, a takeaway or a sandwich shop more or less at random, the odds are overwhelming that it scored full marks at its most recent inspection. More than nine in ten. That's not luck — it's a genuine credit to the businesses keeping their kitchens in order and to the environmental health team doing the visits. Wales punches above its weight in this list, taking two of the top six.
There's a subtlety in Bassetlaw worth teasing out, because it shows why two different stats can both matter. Wrexham has the higher *proportion* of 5s, at 93.2%. But Bassetlaw edges ahead on *average* rating, 4.96 against Wrexham's 4.94. How? The average is pulled down by the spread of lower scores, not just the count of top ones. An area can have slightly fewer perfect 5s yet a higher average if the businesses that aren't on 5 are clustered at 4 rather than scattered down at 2 and 3. So a place with a few 1s and 2s will see its average sag even with a healthy pile of 5s. Bassetlaw's 4.96 says almost nobody there is down at the bottom of the scale.
Coastal and county districts feature heavily, and that's not an accident. Thanet, North Kesteven, Bassetlaw — these tend to have a more settled mix of established independents and chains, fewer brand-new openings churning through every month, and a smaller proportion of premises still waiting on a first inspection. A stable business base shows up as a stable, high score.
Why some areas score lower
At the other end of the published figures, a handful of authorities have a lower proportion of 5-rated businesses:
- Newham — 45.4% rated 5, average 3.96.
- Camden — 46.2% rated 5, average 4.24.
- Barking and Dagenham — 46.3% rated 5, average 4.18.
- Walsall — 46.8% rated 5, average 4.25.
- Ealing — 48.5% rated 5, average 4.17.
It would be a mistake to read this as "the dirtiest places to eat", and I'd genuinely ask you not to. A lower share of top ratings can reflect several things that have little to do with whether you'll get a good, safe meal tonight.
Start with geography. Four of these five are London boroughs, and the fifth, Walsall, is a dense West Midlands authority. City areas churn. They have a high turnover of small independent businesses — the unit that was a Turkish grill last spring is a Caribbean takeaway now and might be a bubble-tea shop by Christmas. Every one of those new openings starts the clock again. A brand-new premises often hasn't had its first inspection yet, or has had it and is still ironing out the early teething problems that a five-year-old kitchen sorted long ago. That mechanically drags down the share of 5s without anyone serving you a worse meal. Our explainer on what "awaiting inspection" means covers that situation.
Then there's the snapshot problem, which is the single most misunderstood thing about these ratings. A score is a photograph taken on one day. A business that scored a 3 last year may well have fixed the fridge that was running a degree too warm, or finally written up the cleaning schedule the inspector asked for, and be sitting on a 5 today — the open data simply hasn't caught up because nobody has been back yet. Re-inspections aren't instant. A business can even request and pay for one once it's made improvements, but there's a queue. So the gap between "what the score says" and "what the kitchen is actually like right now" can be months wide, and it almost always points in the optimistic direction. You can read more in how food hygiene inspections work.
It helps to know what actually pulls a score down, because people picture grime and it's usually nothing of the sort. The rating is built from three components: how hygienically the food is handled, the condition and cleanliness of the building, and — the one that catches people out — how the business manages food safety, meaning records, training and systems. A spotless kitchen with brilliant food can still land a 3 if the manager can't show the paperwork: no documented cleaning rota, no fridge temperature logs, no allergen records. None of that is visible to you as a diner. A lot of the difference between a 5 and a 3 lives in a folder, not on a worktop. If the language on any of this is fuzzy, the glossary lays out the terms.
And the averages, read plainly, are reassuring. Even Newham's 3.96 — the lowest here — sits just under "good" and well above the legal floor. An area averaging 4.17, like Ealing, means the typical business there comfortably meets the standard the law demands. A 3 isn't a fail. It means "generally satisfactory": the place is meeting the requirements, with some things to improve. The genuinely worrying scores are 0 and 1, and those are a small minority everywhere, including in the boroughs at the bottom of this table.
A real-world example of how this misleads
Picture two streets. One's a parade in North Kesteven with a baker, a chippy and a pub that have all traded for fifteen years and all hold 5s — easy, stable, predictable. The other's a stretch of high street in Newham with thirty units, half of them under two years old, three currently awaiting their first inspection, two recently reopened under new owners and not yet re-scored. The food on the second street might be every bit as safe. The aggregate number just can't tell the difference between "poor hygiene" and "lots of new businesses mid-process". A league table flattens all of that into one percentage, and the percentage gets the headline.
Population density does the rest. More people means more premises, more premises means more first inspections in the pipeline at any moment, and a higher raw count of lower-scored businesses even where the *rate* is fine. High counts often track footfall, not filth. If you like poking at the underlying numbers yourself, the national statistics page lets you do exactly that.
How to use this for your own meals
National league tables are good fun, and they're a fair way to spot a trend. But the rating that actually affects your dinner is the one for the specific place you're about to walk into — not the borough average, and certainly not last year's. Here's how to put it to work:
- Look up the business by name and check its current score before you order, and remember what each 0–5 rating actually means so a 4 doesn't read as a warning when it isn't.
- Use our compare tool to weigh two nearby options side by side, or the map if you're picking somewhere on the hoof.
- Browse the full rankings and dig into the statistics if you enjoy the numbers — and remember every figure on this page is a living snapshot that shifts on re-inspection.
One practical habit worth forming: in England, Wales and Northern Ireland, only Wales legally requires the green-and-black sticker in the window, so an English café isn't obliged to show its score at all. The absence of a sticker tells you nothing. Check the ratings directory rather than reading silence as a bad sign.
If you ever come across something that genuinely worries you while you're out — not a low historic score, but a real, present concern like raw and cooked food sharing a surface, or staff handling cash and unwrapped food with the same hands — that's worth acting on. You can report a food business to its local authority, and for what counts as a food-poisoning concern versus a grumble about cold chips, the NHS guidance on food poisoning is the sensible reference. The full data and methodology behind the scheme sit with the Food Standards Agency.
So whether your postcode sits near the top of this table or somewhere quietly working its way up, the honest takeaway is a calm one: across the UK, the large majority of food businesses meet good hygiene standards, and the gap between best and worst here is narrower than the headline percentages suggest. Treat the league table as a curiosity. Treat the individual rating as the thing that matters.