Trading standards and environmental health services (partners in local government since the nineteenth-century) are similar, yet different. Both require ‘boots on the ground’ and local knowledge. Both protect the public from wrongdoing and ignorance in trading, occasionally – though less often in environmental health – in the form of large-scale, organized crime. Trading standards offences tend to be black and white; environmental health ones more often involve shades of grey and judgment calls.
Both professions have come have come under the spotlight with important consultations on their scope and functions, originating from the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills. Reading the documents show that they are perceived very differently by government. The consultation for trading standards, Empowering and Protecting Consumers, is positive in tone throughout with case studies on successful trading standards interventions. It asserts: ‘without robust enforcement of consumer law, consumer confidence could drop, depressing economic activity.
By contrast BIS’s discussion paper on regulation (mainly environmental health) is subtitled ‘freeing up business for growth.’ It dwells on negatives: ‘what aspects of regulatory enforcement are most problematic for you?’ and ‘do you have examples of when you were treated unreasonably?’. Although good environmental health advice and enforcement also nourish healthy and profitable business – for example through food hygiene rating and other accreditation and education schemes – this is not sufficiently appreciated at government level.
Environmental health, unlike trading standards, spread across more than one government department – it crosses from BIS into the domains of health and the environment, food and rural affairs and even work and pensions. In policy term, this is a problem. Each department understands one aspect of environmental health, but not the whole.
However, one can also draw common themes across the two consultations. Both propose new national co-ordination forums – for trading standards a policy board and for environmental health a steering group, liaising between the Better Regulation Delivery Organisation and BIS. This body, potentially, will give the CIEH a new direct line of access to a minister, which can only help in clarifying, at a high level, the unique features of environmental health in protecting consumers, promoting a healthy economy and fostering wellbeing.
Tags: Chartered Institute of Environmental Health, EHN extra, Environmental Health News, General environmental health
11/07/2011 at 11:09 am |
Dear Will
Thoughtful article as always. Has the time come for a really fundamental look at the regulation and enforcement roles and future opportunities of both the Trading Standards and Envual Health professions? First, of course, and I speak as a manager of some experience at running a unitary authorities single “public protection” service incorporating both professions together with Licensing officers, a single unified training curriculum and qualification should be mooted. Secondly, the wider need for the monitoring of “standards” in the public’s eye should be considered for inclusion in any further development of the training of future professionals. For instance, why not include the concept of regulating standards of care in sheltered accommodation, nursing and care homes. This is hardly a quantum leap from what we now achieve in, say, bed and breakfast establishments and HMOs. Such steps would move to ensure employment opportunities for emerging professionals, create confidence in the public that appropriate enforcement was being undertaken by competent professionals (Can the Care Quality Commission claim this?) and widen the influence of the CIEH.
Yours ever,
D.P. Stick