What we do

Officers from the Trading Standards Service protect you by tackling unfair business practices affecting most of the goods and services you buy.  Where a business deliberately or accidentally breaks the law, Trading Standards has a range of options to tackle that behaviour.  The most common areas of complaint include mis-described goods and services, unsafe items, food labelling and allergen concerns and underage sales.

We support businesses with specialist advice on legal compliance and best practice and offer a metrology service to ensure weights and measures are accurate

We also work closely with the farming sector to protect the health and welfare of farm animals by preventing the spread of diseases such as foot and mouth by ensuring that registration and movement processes are followed, and contingency plans have been created and kept updated. As a rural County, we realise how important this work is and we do everything we can to support people who keep farmed animals.

What we cannot do

We are here to protect consumers and support businesses, we do this through providing the best possible service we can in our areas of responsibility, but there are some areas where we are unable to help.

If you are a consumer seeking help putting right a breach of contract or obtaining a repair, refund, or putting another civil matter right; the best port of call is the Consumer Advice Service.

We work closely with the service and if there are elements of situations they are dealing with in which we can assist they will involve us, but they provide the advice and support you need when things go wrong. You can contact them on 0808 223 1133.

Our service standards

Requests for consumer advice should be made initially to the Citizens Advice Consumer Service. They will inform us of any complaint or enquiry which they feel requires further action by our Service.

We are not able to investigate all complaints reported to us. If we are able to investigate your complaint we will contact you for further information.

We will respond to requests for business advice within 5 working days. If your enquiry requires a detailed response this can take longer. If we are not able to resolve your enquiry within 10 working days we will contact you to advise of the date by which you can reasonably expect a response.

Please note that we are no longer able to give advice to personal callers without an appointment.