The Ever-Decreasing Circles: Trading Standards Prosecutions, by Edward Elton

Published on 23/10/2025

Which? reported this week that one fifth of Trading Standards teams recorded no criminal prosecutions in the 2023-2024 financial year.

What incredibly good news for us all – so long as the reason for this is that there was simply no criminal activity to investigate. Perhaps that is a little bit too optimistic? An alternative reason could be that there were some low-level transgressions, but of the type, and by the sort of trader, which meant that a few words of advice from Trading Standards, and the odd warning letter here and there, was all that was required.

Sadly, that sort of world is recognisable only to Professor Pangloss in Voltaire’s Candide. For those of us stuck in the real world, especially those of us who prosecute the cases that do get brought, the picture is rather different. Trading Standards departments have suffered the same budgetary squeezes that other Local Authority departments have suffered: According to an article in the House of Lords library, spending per person is now 11% less than it was in the year 2010-2011[1] and the Revenue Support Grant, which is a key central government grant to Local Authorities, plummeted by 56.3% between 2015-16 and 2019-20[2]. In that sort of environment, and where the population increase over time, every department is having to try to do more with less, and with fewer people to do it. Experienced officers retire to be replaced by newly-qualified or apprentice officers, and the confidence to pull the trigger on an investigation is lost. Defence solicitors can become more confident about seeking to disrupt the investigation at an early stage, and then offer to accept a warning at the moment of greatest uncertainty.  Which junior officer is going to want to make a name for herself or himself by wasting time and money on a prosecution that fails?

In addition, private prosecutions have caught the eye of the Government: in March of this year, Sarah Sackman KC, a Justice Minister, together with the Lord Chancellor Shabana Mahmood, announced a government-led consultation proposing reforms to private prosecutions. They backed a mandatory code of practice, inspections, accreditation of private prosecutors, and transparency measures. Technically, because they are not investigated by the Police and litigated by the CPS, any prosecutions brought by Trading Standards are private prosecutions, even where the origins of the investigation lie with the Police. Just recently I was involved in a case where two PCs were searching a van, and came across two boxes and a bin-bag filled with illicit tobacco. As one asked the other, gloriously caught on Body-worn camera, “Here, Dave: who do we call about dodgy fags?” Enter the local Trading Standards officers, stage right.

But when private prosecutions are out of fashion, why would a Local Authority stick its head above the parapet in times like these, if it didn’t have to? The short answer is, of course, that where there is serious criminality, and where the two parts of the Full Code test for Crown Prosecutors are met, then that is the right thing to do. Those two parts are i) evidentially, there is a reasonable prospect of a successful prosecution, and ii) there is a public interest in bringing the prosecution.

Over a period of more than twenty years, both the barristers at 12CP and the Local Authorities who send them work, have come to expect that the instructed advocate will be asked to advise at a very early stage: this avoids the risk that a fatally-flawed prosecution could eat into the meagre resources of the instructing department, and also means that important supporting evidence can be identified and obtained at an early stage.

The result of this is that  those prosecutions which do make it to court are, quite frequently, so well-prepared that defendants offer up guilty pleas, avoiding the risk and the expense of trials. In addition, it means that those cases that are fought to the end, usually conclude in guilty verdicts, and what follows from there is often POCA confiscation or the award of most of the prosecution’s costs, or both.

I suppose the moral of the story is this: investigate well, instruct trial counsel early enough to advise, and have the courage to bring the strong cases to court – after all, in the long run it might well end up not costing the department a penny!

[1] https://lordslibrary.parliament.uk/local-government-finances-impact-on-communities/0/?utm_

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/news/local-government-funding-at-the-spending-review-2015?utm_