The importance of Trading Standards in protecting the safety of consumers
This year’s Trading Standards Wales Spotlight campaign focuses on raising awareness of the wide-ranging work carried out by Trading Standards officers across Wales.
We are all consumers – whether that’s buying toys for the children in our lives, food for a family meal, electrical items for our homes, or arranging improvements or repairs where we live. Every time we buy goods or services, there is a potential risk. Trading Standards officers work hard to protect everyone from unsafe products, and unfair trading practices, helping to keep every consumer safe and confident.
This year’s Trading Standards Wales Spotlight campaign focuses on raising awareness of the wide-ranging work carried out by Trading Standards officers across Wales. Over a three-day period, we’ll be shining a light on one of our key areas – consumer safety. You’ll also be able to listen to a series of podcasts introducing you to your local officers and the important work they do to keep consumers safe.
Trading Standards Wales brings together all the Trading Standards services across Wales in a collaborative partnership. By working together, we ensure consistency across local authority boundaries and focus our efforts on the issues that matter most to the public and to businesses. By pooling resources on key projects, we can make the best use of shrinking budgets, target criminal activity more effectively, and provide stronger support to legitimate businesses.
Over the past year, our officers will have taken part in some of these joint projects, and we welcome the opportunity to tell you more about how we use an intelligence-led approach and work in partnership with other authorities to make the greatest impact and achieve our key performance indicators.
It’s a great opportunity for us to share more with you about what we do and why we do it – and we invite you to visit our website to learn more: https://tradingstandards.gov.wales/en/tswweek/ and follow @WalesTS on ‘X’ to find out more about what other authorities are doing too.
You may already be familiar with various aspects of Trading Standards’ work through our local prosecutions and press releases, but we’d like the chance to tell you about some of the other areas of our work that you might not realise have an impact on the Council – for example, energy efficiency, safeguarding, and protecting local businesses.