Having gone to the Trading Standards office at Quality House on Willesden Lane yesterday, I am now far more familiar with the astonishing variety of stuff they do. Brent and Harrow Councils have a combined Trading Standards arm which does more cases than the rest of London put together.
The work they do includes tracking down counterfeiting operations of every good you can imagines _ shirts, wine, hair straighteners all sorts. They also do a lot of work around child safety on underage sales or childrens' toys, and helping vulnerable people being ripped off by dodgy builders and the like. This is in addition to the fair trading work making sure that what you get is what you paid for.
Although I think many people regard these issues as small scale, some of their cases involve large scale operations. The bigger cases deal with organised crime and schemes worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Thanks to the Proceeds of Crime Act (POCA), it is now possible to seize the criminals profits. Even if they claim not to have the money, the debt can be recovered even years afterward.
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