About National Trading Standards

National Trading Standards is responsible for gathering important intelligence from around the country to combat rogue traders and tackle a number of priorities. These priorities currently include mass marketing and internet scams to other enforcement issues that go beyond local authority boundaries.

For more information on our work areas and teams please visit the  Work Areas page.

How we work

National Trading Standards is different to the support provided by local trading standards services and the Chartered Trading Standards Institute. We work closely with these partners to help us in our goals, but our remit is focused solely on leading investigations into trading standards offences.

To report a trading standards issue or to contact one of our partners, please  click here.

National Trading Standards recognises that it is important to co-ordinate activities and to clearly communicate priorities for case selection and the deployment of resources. We have put systems in place to ensure that enforcement action is co-ordinated to achieve the greatest level of protection for consumers and businesses.

NTS Business Plan 2019-20

NTS Annual Report 2018-19

National Trading Standards Board

National Trading Standards delivers national and regional consumer protection enforcement. Its Board is made up of senior and experienced heads of local government trading standards from around England and Wales with an independent Chair. Its purpose is to protect consumers and safeguard legitimate businesses by tackling serious national and regional consumer protection issues and organised criminality and by providing a “safety net” to limit unsafe consumer goods entering the UK and protecting food supplies by ensuring the animal feed chain is safe.

Chair - Lord Toby Harris

Lord Toby Harris was appointed as Chair of the National Trading Standards Board in May 2013.

He was made a Life Peer in June 1998 and is Chair of the Labour Peers. He is Chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Policing and Treasurer of the Parliamentary Internet and Communications Technology Forum (PICTFOR). He was a member of the Joint Committee on National Security from 2010 to 2014, a member of the House of Lords Select Committee that reported on Personal Internet Security in 2007 and chaired the Olympic and Paralympic Legacy Committee in 2013.

He was the first Chair of the Metropolitan Police Authority (MPA) and sat on the MPA from 2004 until 2012, as the representative of the Home Secretary with a remit to oversee the national and international functions of the Metropolitan Police - primarily its role in counter-terrorism and security. From 2009 to 2015, he was the Chair of the Independent Advisory Panel on Deaths in Custody that reports to the Ministry of Justice, the Home Office and the Department of Health, and led the independent review that published “The Harris Review - Changing Prisons, Saving Lives” in 2015.

Lord Harris graduated from Cambridge University in 1975, having studied Natural Sciences and Economics and where he was President of the Cambridge Union. He was subsequently Deputy Director of the Electricity Consumers’ Council and Director of the Association of Community Health Councils. He is a former council leader and member of the London Assembly.

Governance

For more information on the Governance arrangements please click here for the English version and click here for the Welsh version.

Funding

Funding is provided by the Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS), the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), Home Office, Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) and the Food Standards Agency (FSA) to support the work of National Trading Standards.