Never forget that all the sound and fury in Westminster is about something very real. Politicians and their parties are not “all the same”. On one side, the Conservatives diminish and damage the public realm, the lives and livelihoods of those with least and the quality of civic values. On the other side, Labour strives to improve public services, the public sphere and enhance the life chances and living standards of those people that the Tories do down.
I’m not sure why I am still so easily shocked by the Tories’ vandalism. But time and again I come across some new act of sabotage that takes my breath away. This time it’s their stripping out of an already thin veneer of civilisation by laying waste to trading standards. Now this is a dull and invisible service, you might think, the sort of thing anyone from a first-world country could take for granted. No longer, just as you no longer assume the rivers are safe from sewage.
Enfield council, in north London, may be about to lose its entire trading standards department. Three of its deeply diminished team of four are being sacked to save costs, and the remaining manager is resigning in protest: this is not a job for one person. Everywhere else the service is in steep decline, with the Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI) telling me there are half as many trading standards officers in local government as a decade ago: 2,500 highly skilled professionals have been lost. Enfield’s Labour council may not be particularly to blame: councils cut to the bone since 2010 have to make unspeakable choices to shrink vulnerable children’s services, social care for the frail, public health, housing, bin collections – or other statutory essentials. (Since Enfield never replied to my query, I don’t know.)
What do trading standards officers (TSOs) do? They have more than 290 pieces of legislation to enforce. Weights and measures officials, existing since time immemorial, still need to check scales in shops, baby scales in clinics or airport scales that airlines use to claim your bag is overweight: scales are often wildly wrong. A supermarket packet claiming to contain 500g often doesn’t. You assume a litre of petrol goes into your tank because you imagine someone checks. But that happens less and less – and traders know it.
Just look at the long list of areas of life that TSOs are supposed, by law, to police, and it’s hair-raising how little now gets inspected. Take a very deep breath here before reading this random selection: gas appliances, offensive weapons, botulinum toxin in cosmetic fillers, tenant fees, package holidays, money laundering, fireworks, olive oil marketing, scrap metal, sunbed safety, timeshare holidays, dog breeding, infant formula, mineral water, lotteries and gambling, Christmas Day trading, GM food, battery hens, tobacco advertising, the Knives Act, car tyres and brake linings, calorie counts on packets, the Clean Air Act, copyright and patents, furniture fire safety, motorcycle noise, nightwear safety, the Estate Agents Act, dangerous wild animals, unsolicited goods and services.
Incidentally, since David Cameron and George Osborne are being grilled by the Covid inquiry this week on the abysmal state of Britain’s preparedness, remember that TSOs are also responsible for checking personal protection equipment (PPE). How unlikely it looks that Britain will be any better prepared for another pandemic. Or indeed for another Grenfell, since TSOs check cladding materials and electrical equipment, such as the faulty fridge that started the tower block fire.
I spent time with a Hammersmith and Fulham TSO with more than 30 years experience, Doug Love, who showed me round his warehouse of evidence that is waiting – a long time these days – for court cases prosecuting offenders. Shelves were stacked high with bags of allegedly counterfeit cigarettes and illegal and possibly dangerous vapes, vodka of unknown origin that often lands people in A&E, fake batteries (a danger on e-bikes and scooters), fire-hazard fake mobile chargers and toxic cosmetics. He had cases of wine misspelled “shardonnay”, and e-cigarettes with untested levels of heavy metals. He had just completed a case that took five years, concerning the mass theft of access to TV platforms. He speaks of giving evidence more often now at coroners’ courts after anaphylactic shock deaths due to killer allergens that have not been listed on packaging. These days, he says, checks largely only happen after a complaint or intelligence is received.
Last week, the CTSI conducted a spot check in Salford, issuing a stark warning after toy testing revealed bows and arrows with 100 times the legal limit of phthalates – and fashion dolls 300 times over the limit of these chemicals, which have been linked to cancer. The institute found that the cost of living crisis was driving Salford people to buy cheap and dangerous counterfeit goods. “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” they said, “likely to be replicated across the UK.”
Smugglers, counterfeiters and poisoners need not head to Enfield: just about everywhere is “at breaking point”, says the chair of the CTSI, Tendy Lindsay. She warns me that the UK is becoming “the dustbin of Europe”, saying that the UK “no longer shares intel” with the 27 EU countries about dangerous chemicals and products. At the ports, there are now few TSOs, she says, with Border Force under pressure to get things through ports quickly.
The idea that Britain is about to start rigorous border checks on goods arriving from the EU is delusional. But the rest of the world may become concerned about uninspected rogue goods and services from the UK: a reputation for safety and probity once lost is hard to recapture. It may hardly matter if the Brexiteers strip away vital EU compliance regulations if no one enforces them anyway. This is becoming a country where civilisation’s safety nets seem perilously frayed.
Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist
