Trading Standards and Grenfell

Yesterday the Grenfell Inquiry published their final report. Unsurprisingly, it showed numerous failures from multiple organisations and crucially, it didn’t seem to pin the blame on any one particular organisation.

I feel for the victims. They must be full of rage that people/businesses have made or saved money which has contributed to the death of a friend or family member. I am clear though that the main blame lies with the public sector organisations. Because their role is ultimately to protect against private businesses who are usually (but not always) looking to make a quick buck. I do have some sympathy for them though because I know what’s it is like to be a small cog in a big wheel that you have no control over and you just follow ‘the system’.

The issues that led to Grenfell exist within Trading Standards – the whole system is badly organised, run and funded. And it is failing. I can absolutely guarantee you that up and down the country

• people are losing small and large sums of money to deceptive businesses
• people are eating food that is not as advertised and potentially unsafe
• animals are suffering
• unsafe products are on sale

The reality is that much of this goes unnoticed. Unfortunately, I think it will take some sort of massive incident with an unsafe product causing injuries or deaths for it to come to the fore. And if a review is ever carried out, I am sure it will take 5 years to tell you the exact thing I can tell you now.

I found the comments about building control very interesting. If you don’t know, currently you can choose to use your local council building control or you can pay a private company to do it. We have dealt with numerous issues with building works complaints and when we need to speak to building control, we tend to find the council officers have at least sometimes tried to help the consumer by not signing off questionable works, whereas with the private ones seemingly sign off anything. We have also found it hard to speak to private ones to get information about what they saw/did whereas the council building control tend to be more helpful.

In my view, regulators should be at arm’s length from any money. As soon as you bring money into it, you cannot regulate properly. I see this with Primary Authority in Trading Standards. Primary Authority allows a Trading Standards department to take money from a private business to provide to advice and guidance. But you can bet your bottom dollar that the Primary Authority Trading Standards is going to be the last one in the queue to take enforcement action against them if they are found to be up to no good. And to make matters worse, most Trading Standards will refer complaints to the Primary Authority Trading Standards – so the primary Authority has all the complaints but isn’t doing its enforcement role properly. I saw this happening regularly even as far as Trading Standards Officers trying to downplay illegal behaviour to protect their business (who is probably partly paying their wages). It is a conflict.

Another area where wee see this is in weights and measures. Previously, before any equipment could be used to weigh or measures products for trade, it had to be checked by an independent person (a Trading Standards Officer). The rules changed around 25 years ago so businesses could check their own equipment. Whilst this does make life easier for the business, we are finding that they often don’t carry out checks as thoroughly as we would do and equipment can often be out of legal tolerance.

What are the key problems?

1. There are approximately 200 Trading Standards departments in the UK all operating independently and all doing different types of work – some do weights and measures and some don’t. Some do fair trading work and some don’t. It’s a post code lottery and a shambles.
2. There are probably 140 Trading Standards departments too many. This makes the system inefficient – particularly when so much trade is cross border. We only need 50 or 60 TS departments, and cutting down could lead to lots of savings and efficiencies.
3. In order to have a Trading Standards department that is well rounded with skills and experience and to efficiently cover a reasonable population – you need 25ish staff. I think all TS that have fewer than 10 staff are a bit pointless and they cannot be doing a complete job for their residents. I would argue there is not one single Trading Standards that is really doing a good job – we know that because we were all much better 15 years ago.
4. We don’t have enough funding. I bet most councils don’t even know what the TS department does and many are just left to do whatever they want.
5. We need more centralised guidance and control to ensure consistency.
6. Our work straddles across multiple Government department but there is no joined up thinking across those Government departments.
7. Some of the national regulators like the Food Standards Agency and the Office for Product and Safety and Standards are a bit lacking. The OPSS is literally overseeing the death of weights and measures provision in the UK. I predict in 10 years we will have very few officers who are competent to do weights and measures checks.
8. We don’t have a Minister for Consumer Affairs who seems interested and the job is always moving around to a different person.
9. New laws are created which are badly worded or don’t actually address the problems we know exist. Since we have left the EU, we have replaced some laws but we haven’t really taken the chance to improve them as much as we can.
10. We are not given the tools or powers to do the job properly (in legislation and funding).
11. Primary Authority should cease. I would prefer to see an independent organisation giving all advice. Their role would be to only give advice. This would also ensure consistency across all other TS departments as it would effectively be national advice.
12. We have too many officers who are doing jobs they are not qualified or trained for. There is also a massive lack training provision.
13. The standard of our qualifications is continually being watered down.

There is no one single person or organisation that you can point to and say is responsible for the failure (other then the Prime Minister) – because there are so many cogs in the system – and which is why it will take a Grenfell type of disaster to uncover and expose its failings.