How to open a restaurant in the UK: the legal and practical steps

Opening a restaurant in the UK isn't one licence. It's a stack of separate duties owned by different bodies: the council's food safety team, the licensing authority, the fire and rescue service, HSE and your insurer. None of them are hard on their own. The trouble is that they land in the same few weeks as the fit-out, the hiring and the menu tasting.

Here is the stack in a sensible order, with the differences between England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland flagged.

The short version

1. Premises fit for food: handwashing, cleanable surfaces, ventilation, pest proofing.
2. Register as a food business with your council at least 28 days before trading. Free, can't be refused.
3. Food safety management system based on HACCP, running from the first delivery.
4. Allergen information for every dish, covering the 14 allergens.
5. Licences if you sell alcohol, play music, provide entertainment or serve hot food late at night.
6. Fire risk assessment, written down.
7. Staff: right-to-work checks, employers' liability insurance, training, a rota.
8. Systems for the daily checks that prove all of the above.

1. Premises that work for food safety

The FSA's guidance for new food businesses sets out what your premises need. Get these into the design before the builders start, because they're expensive to retrofit:

• enough handwashing basins with hot and cold water
• separate sinks for washing food, with hot and cold water
• facilities for cleaning and storing equipment
• floors, walls, ceilings, doors and surfaces that are durable and easy to clean and disinfect
• removable insect screens on openings to the outside
• adequate ventilation, lighting and drainage
• changing facilities where needed
• grease traps and strainers, because fat, oil and grease shouldn't go down the sink

2. Register as a food business

Register with your local council at least 28 days before you start trading. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland you do this through the GOV.UK food business registration service; in Scotland, through your council's environmental health service. It's free and can't be refused, and each premises needs its own registration.

Registering tells the council's food safety team you exist. They'll inspect you, usually unannounced, and higher-risk businesses come first, so it may be several months. Full details are in how to register a food business.

3. A food safety management system

You need written food safety procedures based on HACCP principles. Most independent restaurants use a ready-made HACCP-based pack:

These cover the "4Cs": cleaning, cooking, chilling and avoiding cross-contamination, plus personal hygiene, pest control and management checks. Whichever you use, it has to match how your kitchen really works, and you need daily records to prove you follow it. See HACCP for small restaurants.

Two legal points that new operators miss:

• Traceability. You must keep records of your suppliers (and any businesses you supply), up to date and available for inspection. Filed invoices usually do it.
• Chilling. In England, Wales and Northern Ireland, chilled food must be kept at 8°C or below by law. Scotland recommends the same. The FSA advises setting fridges to 5°C or below to keep that margin.

4. Allergens

You must provide allergen information for the food you serve and manage allergens in the kitchen. The 14 allergens are celery, cereals containing gluten, crustaceans, eggs, fish, lupin, milk, molluscs, mustard, peanuts, sesame, soybeans, sulphur dioxide and sulphites (above 10 parts per million) and tree nuts. That includes garnishes, sauces and additives.

If you sell for delivery, allergen information must be available before the customer buys and again when the food arrives. If you pack anything on site before it's ordered (desserts in pots, sandwiches for a takeaway counter), that's prepacked for direct sale, and in England, Wales and Northern Ireland it needs a label with the food's name and a full ingredients list with allergens emphasised. Read Natasha's Law explained and use the allergen matrix template.

The FSA offers free online food allergy training, which is a good start for the whole team.

5. Licences: alcohol, music, entertainment and late-night food

Selling alcohol

The system is different in each part of the UK.

In England and Wales, a business can have only one DPS, and the DPS is the person with day-to-day responsibility for the premises. In Northern Ireland the court can grant a licence for up to five years, and restaurants must display a notice of the conditions for selling and drinking alcohol on the premises.

Late-night food and entertainment (England and Wales)

Under the Licensing Act, selling hot food or hot drink to the public between 11pm and 5am is "late night refreshment" and is licensable. So is regulated entertainment, such as live or recorded music, performed in front of an audience. These are usually covered in your premises licence, so think about your opening hours and any live music before you apply.

Music licence

Separately from the premises licence, you usually need a licence to play recorded or live music in public, including background music. It's called TheMusicLicence, from PPL PRS. You don't need it for royalty-free music.

6. Fire safety

Whoever controls the premises must carry out a fire risk assessment, act on it and review it regularly. In England, the assessment must be recorded in full, whatever the size of the business. Scotland (Fire (Scotland) Act 2005) and Northern Ireland have their own fire laws with similar duties. See our fire safety checklist for pubs and restaurants.

7. Staff

• Right-to-work checks before anyone starts.
• Employers' liability insurance of at least £5 million from an FCA-authorised insurer as soon as you employ staff in England, Scotland or Wales. Fines can be £2,500 for each day without cover.
• A written health and safety policy once you have five or more employees.
• Food hygiene training. Food handlers don't legally need a certificate, but they must be trained and supervised for the work they do, and you need to show it.
• Illness rules. Staff with diarrhoea or vomiting must not return to food handling until they've had no symptoms for 48 hours. See food handler sickness exclusion.
• A rota that covers the hours you open with the right skills on each shift. See restaurant staff rota software.

8. Systems: set them up before the doors open

The first weeks of a new restaurant are chaos, and that's exactly when habits form. If temperature checks, closing checks and allergen updates aren't built into the routine before opening, they won't get done consistently later. And because you don't know when your first inspection will be, your records need to be complete from day one.

Things to have running before you trade:

• temperature logs for every fridge, freezer and hot-hold unit
• opening and closing checks, and a cleaning schedule
• an allergen matrix that front-of-house can check
• supplier records
• training records
• an incident and maintenance log
• risk assessments you can find and print
• a published rota, a record of hours actually worked, and one place for team announcements

Opening timeline

Mistakes to avoid

• Licensing too late. Food registration is quick; alcohol licensing isn't.
• A food safety pack that sits on a shelf. Officers look at whether you follow it, not whether you own it.
• Allergen info that lags behind menu changes. Every new special needs its allergens checked before it goes on the board.
• No records in the first month. Inspections are usually unannounced and can come early.
• The head chef as the only one who knows anything. If the system lives in one person's head, it leaves when they have a day off.

How ShiftComplete helps

ShiftComplete is the everyday operations and rota app built for UK hospitality, by hospitality. Setting it up before you open means the routine starts right:

• Temperature logs for every fridge, freezer, hot-hold and ambient point, each with its own range; out-of-range readings flagged on the dashboard; named and timestamped with a 7-day rolling view.
• Checklists for opening, closing, cleaning and due-diligence checks that differ by weekday, with photo evidence when you want it.
• Allergens for every menu item mapped to the 14 allergens, searchable by front-of-house, editable only by managers.
• Incidents, maintenance and risk assessments logged and kept in one place.
• Rotas from staff availability, with labour cost shown while you build, published to every phone. Staff can request holiday from their phone for you to approve.
• Clocking in and out, if you switch it on: staff clock in on their phone or the shared tablet, you see hours worked against the rota, and you can download hours as a spreadsheet with a total per person to hand to whoever runs your payroll.

As Graeme Kirkham, Owner of The Lounge Oswestry & Knock & Snitch, put it: "The rota stopped being a Sunday-night argument the week we switched over. The chef stopped being the only person who knows what's in the kitchen. And the EHO turn up to a screen, not a box file." Read the Kirkham Hospitality story.

It helps you keep the records an EHO asks to see; you're still responsible for running a safe kitchen. It costs £1.49 per staff member per month, free for 60 days, no card needed.