Bradford Council has apologised after mistakenly saying a cafe had a food hygiene rating of zero.

Cafe Plaza, in Bradford Plaza Complex, Leeds Old Road, Thornbury, was falsely identified as one of 27 food establishments in the district with the lowest possible food hygiene score.

Angry manager Yasser Khalid said the error had lost them business.

All scores are published online on the Food Standards Agency’s website, but Bradford Council mistakenly told the FSA that the Cafe Plaza had scored zero out of five after its staff inspected the premises on January 10 this year.

In fact, the cafe had scored one out of five.

The Council has now issued a statement saying it apologised to the managers for the error.

It said: “Cafe Plaza had a rating of one at their last inspection.

“There was an error when their rating was uploaded to the Food Standards Agency website and this is being corrected. We have apologised to the business for that mistake.

“Cafe Plaza has been revisited to check that they have addressed the issues that resulted in their rating of one. The business has not requested a re-rating inspection.”

Mr Khalid said: “It would be nice if they had apologised to me personally, which I didn’t get.

“We have lost customers because of this, definitely. We have taken some stick.

“We are lucky in the fact that many of the customers we have got have stood by us.

“They realised it must have been a mistake but I have a headache from explaining to each one of them that it was an error.”

Mr Khalid said the cafe has also had a change of management since the inspection, as he had only been manager for around six weeks.

He said he and his staff had worked hard to improve the cafe since taking over.

He said: “We have had the whole place refurbished, we have new staff, I have a new cleaning team. It has totally changed.”