About

We are a small group of IT developers, designers and support staff.

Back in 2005 our team were the originators of Scores on the Doors – the forerunner of the Food Standards Agency’s (FSA) Food Hygiene Rating Scheme (FHRS). It was and still is the most successful scheme ever in improving food hygiene standards. Today compliance rates have jumped by over 30 percentage points and 76% of food businesses in England have 5 stars. The initiative was named by the Royal Society of Public Health as one of the top 20 environmental health initiatives of the 20th century.

Our original vision was to create a single site where members of the public could find the hygiene status of restaurants, café’s and take-ways without having to search up to 400 individual council websites. By making the information available to consumers it leverages greater customer choice and food business operators have an added incentive to improve their standards.

In the 2018 Animal Welfare Act a new 1-5 star rating scheme was created for Animal establishment operators in England. They are required to be licensed and inspected by their Local Authorities, who in turn are obliged to publish details on their websites.

However today many Operators remain unlicensed and some authorities still do not publish the information. For those that do, the details published often inconsistent from authority to authority, can be quite difficult to find and navigate. And that’s IF you know which authority boundary any particular operator is located within.

We wanted to leverage our expertise in collating and publishing this information to help empower consumer awareness of the star rating scheme and to help their search when choosing services for their pets. We believe Paws on the Doors has the potential to encourage better welfare standards and higher penetration of legitimately registered businesses. Please feel use the links below to forward details of the site to pet-owning friends, relatives and colleagues.