CROYDON IN CRISIS: Research by Which? magazine has found trading standards teams at councils such as Croydon’s to be ‘stretched to the point where it’s impossible for them to effectively carry out essential work’
Rare sight: cuts to council funding means lower levels of consumer protection from trading standards
There’s a good reason that Croydon Council’s trading standards department takes 18 months to shut down a dodgy vape store that is blatantly flogging off contraband tobacco. And that’s because, after years of cuts to council staff, our borough’s trading standards department is woefully understaffed.
That’s according to research conducted with local authorities across the country by the Consumer Association, which found that Croydon has just 1.94 trading standards staff per 100,000 of population (Croydon has close to 400,000 residents, so you do the math…).
Earlier this week, Inside Croydon reported how the council had ordered the closure of the Stop and Shop vape store at 79 Church Street, after it had been reported in November 2023 by a resident who bought a packet of cigarettes suspected that they were counterfeit.
The trading standards team at the cash-strapped council undertook a number of test purchases and raids, each time seizing sizeable quantities of illicit goods. “The business failed to take measures to operate within the law and was deemed to be intentionally selling illegal products,” the council said.
Low score: Which?’s work has identified Croydon as one local authority with a lower than average number of trading standards officers
The raids, including with search dogs, found that the shop housed numerous purpose-built hidden compartments, which were found to contain hundreds of illegal tobacco products.
According to the council, this is the first closure order of that type that it has undertaken for “illicit tobacco, vapes and associated criminality”.
There might be a very good reason for that…
Dog’s chance: with reduced resources, sniffer dog search operations for contraband tobacco, like this one in Croydon in 2022, become less frequent
Trading standards officers protect the public from crime, dangerous products and blatant rip-offs. The Consumer Association, through their Which? magazine, found that services “are severely stretched in some areas of Britain, leaving consumers facing a postcode lottery”.
Which? FoI’d 187 trading standards services in England, Wales and Scotland to ask about capacity and performance.
“The responses expose shocking differences in staffing levels depending on where people live and services in some areas stretched to the point where it’s impossible for them to effectively carry out essential work such as intercepting fake and dangerous products, rooting out misleading food claims and cracking down on cowboy builders.”
Which? found that if you lived in Orkney, you’d be inhabiting some kind of trading standards Nirvana, with the equivalent of nearly 21 staff per 100,000 people for the remote islands off the coast of northern Scotland (they actually have “almost five” trading standards staff).
But areas in and around London, and most urban districts, have very few staff responsible for enforcing more than 290 pieces of consumer protection legislation.
Which? has identified a significant vacuum in the regulation and enforcement of important areas of consumer affairs. Trading standards teams deal with a wide range of activities, from doorstep crime and rogue traders to botched botox and whether the meat in your takeaway is what it says it is.
Enfield in north London is worse off than Croydon, with just 0.43 staff per 100,000 people.
Knife crime: these knives were taken off the streets through a Croydon trading standards seizure. It could be an important part of reducing violent crime
Enfield cut its trading standards team from four to 1.5 in 2023. And Enfield managed just one prosecution and six seizures of products in the 2023-2024 financial year, but no routine inspections, test purchases or cautions. The year before the cuts, its trading standards seized more than 28,000 packs of smuggled cigarettes, 14.5kg of smuggled tobacco and 1,300 vapes. It investigated more than 1,200 complaints and enquiries.
There’s a similar picture with trading standards across London.
“About two-thirds of trading standards services that answered our question about allocating resources said that low staffing levels meant they couldn’t investigate tip-offs at least some of the time,” Which? reports.
“They’re facing a constant battle in choosing where to focus resources, and some say they’re having to deprioritise certain areas of work – most commonly proactive surveillance (such as routine inspections and test purchases), weights and measures work and intellectual property issues.”
And there are serious, potentially deadly consequences, Which? says, which goes well beyond a few rogue traders or make-a-quick-buck Del Boys.
“Without checks on meat entering the food chain, we risk another horsemeat scandal. Without controls on unsafe building materials, we risk another Grenfell Tower tragedy.”
And Which? gives Croydon as an example of one of the areas ill-served by its understaffed trading standards team. Croydon Council, they say, “has only 1.94 staff members for every 100,000 people – below the average of 3.7 across Great Britain”.
The Which? report says: “Consumers can no longer rely on the enforcement system to protect them. Local services don’t always have the resources or skills to be effective when dealing with the breadth of complex issues but also the range of businesses, from a family-run baker to a multi-million-dollar global corporation.”
The lack of resource is just another symptom of nearly two decades of government austerity policies, which have left Croydon and councils across the country ill-equipped and under-resourced to deliver the services they are expected to provide.
“The government could be spending taxpayers’ money more wisely, modernising trading standards to be more effective at protecting consumers.”
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Per population is an interesting measurement. What about per business? +