Dumbing down of professional standards in Trading Standards?

Trading Standards Officers (TSOs) are responsible for upholding the law and advising businesses/consumers. It is crucial that we are competent enough to carry out our duties.

It probably doesn’t surprise you to know that I think standards are falling.

If we go back to the 80s, 90’s and early 00’s, most people joining TS would go through at least some sort of training program or formal qualification. I guess in those days we had the luxury of being able to pay for training and have competent training officers that trainees could shadow.

Since 2010, budgets have been cut massively, and departments have not been investing in training. Perhaps more importantly they have been losing all the experienced staff that were required to mentor trainees.

The official qualification offered by the Chartered Trading Standards Institute has been dumbed down over the last 20 years – this is not a surprise as local authorities do not want to pay a lot of money to train their staff and many officers now do a very limited scope of work.

The new kid on the block is the apprenticeship. Almost all local authorities seem to be moving towards the apprenticeship because it is cheaper (funded externally). The problem with the apprenticeship is:

1 – students have told me the coursework is very wishy washy and it is not academically rigorous enough

2 – it does not seem to cover some of the fundamentals I would expect in terms of law and professional skills

3 – it relies heavily on learning from colleagues – which is a problem if you don’t have quality people to learn from

Some local authorities have gone down the road of employing people and not putting them through any formal qualifications at all – which is just ridiculous in my view. Very often employing officers from other enforcement agencies (e.g. Police) and expecting them to fit right in – which in my experience does not happen most of the time.

I regularly meet TSOs who do not understand the fundamentals such as contract law, laws around investigations (PACE/CPIA etc) etc. Remember one of the problems found during the ‘post office scandal’ was that staff were not being trained properly.

Let me be clear – it is possible for someone to join Trading Standards and be carrying out criminal investigations without any formal training – and that is happening. At least in the Police you have to go through basic training before being unleashed.

What is the solution to this? I would like to a statutory qualification that any person working in Trading Standards needs to achieve. It needs to be modular, so people are only training for things relevant to their job, but as far as I am concerned all TSOs need to have at least a basic understanding of civil law and core legislation like the DMCC 2024.