Sefton Food Hygiene: Every August Rating So Far Is a Five

Every food hygiene inspection in Sefton whose result has been published for August came back with the top rating. That is 34 venues, all rated 5, according to the Food Standards Agency register, checked by Southport Today on 1 September.

One caveat before anyone declares a perfect month. The register publishes roughly two weeks behind the inspections themselves. The most recent published visit is dated 19 August, so results from the last third of the month will appear through September, and the clean sweep could still be broken. What can be said today is that every published result is a five.

Who got a five in August

The published inspections run from 5 to 19 August and cover the whole borough, from Southport to Bootle. In Southport itself the fives include:

• Clay & Crust, 3-5 Stanley Street
• Lilibets, 24 Stanley Street
• Papa’s Fish and Chips, 387-389 Lord Street
• The Rock Shop, 58 Nevill Street
• Gourmet House, 85 Eastbank Street
• Shakespeare Cafe, 38 Shakespeare Street
• Chippy T, 45 Ovington Drive
• Hillside Golf Club, Hastings Road

Formby’s village centre had a good day on 19 August, when four venues were rated 5 in one sweep:

• The Kitchen, 4 Chapel Alley
• Suay, The Beacons, School Lane
• A & D Cassidy, the butcher at 33 Chapel Lane
• Iceland, 28-30 Chapel Lane

The rest of the August list is care homes, nurseries and convenience stores across Maghull, Crosby, Litherland, Netherton and Bootle, every one of them rated 5.

July’s complete month: 80 fives out of 90

July is now fully published, and it shows what a normal month looks like. Of 90 inspections, 80 scored the maximum, five scored 4, and five fell below that:

A rating of 1 means major improvement is necessary. Businesses can appeal a rating to the council, publish a right of reply on the register, and request a re-visit once improvements are made, so a low score is a snapshot of the inspection day rather than a permanent verdict.

The borough picture: no zeros anywhere

Across the whole register, Sefton lists 2,392 food businesses. Of the 2,147 that currently hold a rating, 1,813, or 84%, hold a 5. A further 220 hold a 4 and 82 hold a 3. Only 32 venues sit below that: 17 rated 2 and 15 rated 1. Not a single venue in the borough currently holds a zero. Another 148 are exempt from rating and 97 are awaiting their first inspection.

Not one of the 32 low-rated venues has a Formby postcode. Six are in Southport:

The same right of appeal and re-inspection applies to all of them, and some of these inspections are more than a year old, so standards may have changed since.

What it means for you

Any venue’s current rating is free to check on the FSA’s search page before you book a table or order a takeaway. The rating covers food handling, the condition of the premises and how the business manages food safety; it is not a judgment on how the food tastes. If you run a food business and think your rating is wrong or out of date, the appeal and re-visit routes go through Sefton Council’s environmental health team.

Eating out is most people’s main contact with these ratings: our things to do in Southport guide covers where the town’s cafes and restaurants cluster. And one venue on this page’s streets is in the news for a different reason: a store at 45-47 Eastbank Street has applied to sell alcohol from 6am until midnight.

Sources

• Food Standards Agency ratings register, Sefton authority data, retrieved 1 September 2026, for every rating, date and address on this page. Individual venue links go to each business’s own register entry.
• The register’s published data for Sefton lists 2,392 establishments; counts and percentages were calculated from the full dataset on the retrieval date.

Ratings change as new inspections are published, typically about two weeks after the visit. A venue’s own register page always carries its current rating.