Lack of capacity
Over the past 10 years, reductions in local government funding have had a significant and detrimental impact on regulatory budgets and staffing. Survey data highlights the extent of the cuts.
Environmental health: Numbers of council Environmental Health Officers in England and Wales
fell by a third (33 per cent) from 2009/10 to 2016/17. Looking at specific areas of environmental health, from 2009/10 to 2016/17, the total number of council food law enforcement staff in the UK fell by 27 per cent and the number of council staff working on food standards in the UK fell by half. In the same period, spending by councils in England on food safety fell by 37 per cent. The number of council health and safety inspectors fell by 48 per cent and spend on health and safety by English councils fell by 41 per cent, in the period from 2009/10 to 2016/17.
Trading standards: According to the
CTSI 2018/2019 Workforce Survey, there was a loss of 99.4 full time qualified (meaning individuals holding a professional trading standards qualification such as DCATS, DTS, CTSP or equivalent) trading standards posts (across the 78 services that responded to the 2017 and 2018 surveys). This is the equivalent of 10 trading standards services of cuts, and comes on top of the 50 posts lost according to the
2017 CTSI Workforce Survey.
The average number of qualified trading standards officers per authority is 9.4 full time equivalent (FTE), but 53 of those responding to the 2018/19 survey had a total of less than six qualified officers. Many trading standards services have less than 5 full time equivalent staff and only one fully qualified trading standards officer. In the 2018/2019 survey, only 44 per cent of those heads of service who responded felt that they have the expertise to cover the statutory duties placed upon their services. This is a large change from 2017, when 70 per cent said they could cover these duties, while 30 per cent said they could not.
In interviews, the report comments that a smaller service summed this situation up as being, "...on a knife edge...", and, "having the team members now to fulfil the role, but going forward they are ageing as a team with little confidence in being able to recruit new staff".
Due to the complexity of the work of trading standards, and the varying priorities between services, CTSI has avoided stating a minimum number of staff that are required to protect consumers. However, the
Audit Scotland report Made to Measurewhich cited that small services with fewer than eight fully trained staff are increasingly unable to provide adequate protection, may be a useful indication.
Staff in these services have huge pride in the work that they do and work tirelessly to deliver for local residents and businesses, but the impact of the cuts has been stark. Even before the impact of COVID-19 and the new demands the pandemic has created, services were struggling to effectively resource the many statutory duties they are responsible for. Although some of these duties – the activities councils are legally required to undertake – may by their nature be reactive, or occur only rarely, thereby requiring little ongoing resources, the range of duties the services have and extent of the cuts mean that councils are now having to prioritise even core areas of activity.
Impact of reduction in capacity: Councils have been unable to carry out all the hygiene and standards interventions that food businesses were "due" according to the Food Law Code of Practice. Almost eighty six per cent of due food hygiene interventions were achieved in 2018/19 in England, while 36.8 per cent of due food standards interventions were achieved in the same period.
Between 2009/10 and 2016/17, proactive health and safety inspections by councils fell by 94 per cent and total health and safety visits fell by 71 per cent in England, Scotland and Wales.
With services not resourced to deliver the same wide range of activity as before, there is a need for trade-offs and prioritisation between competing local and national priorities. While services typically aim to be intelligence led, requirements set at the national level in traditional areas of work (for example, the food law code of practice) can create challenges in most effectively targeting work. Staff report the need to ‘raise the threshold’ on the cases they can take, by either being more willing to drop a case if the investigation indicated that there would be no prospect of successful legal action − or only taking cases where there were significant levels of detriment. A recent report by Unchecked provides an example of the impact this has had on the enforcement of consumer safety regulations.
There are concerns that the reduction in proactive and routine regulatory work as a result of reduced capacity will have a long-term impact on compliance, leading to poorer outcomes and more enforcement issues, as well as undermining the services’ ability to effectively support the big agendas.
Increasing duties and demands
The demand on limited resources has been exacerbated by the ever-increasing enforcement burden that is being placed on councils’ regulatory services and trading standards, despite the fact most councils are already struggling to fulfil their existing statutory duties.
Number of statutory duties: In 2013, as part of the CTSI's National Trading Standards Conversation, 36 Bedford Row Chambers were commissioned to produce a
definitive list of statutory duties for trading standards. This schedule identifies over 250 statutory duties imposed on weights and measures authorities, local authorities, food authorities and feed authorities and other legislation likely to be enforced by trading standards departments. Whilst this list has not been updated, we understand that enforcement responsibilities for both trading standards and environmental health have increased year on year.
In the last two years, councils have seen new enforcement responsibilities created or proposed on diverse issues including: the ban on microbeads in cosmetics; the sale of materials for wood burning stoves; the ban on plastic straws, drink stirrers and cotton buds; the ban on tenant fees; the requirement for electrical safety certificates for privately rented homes; a ban on energy drinks; the introduction of calorie labelling in restaurant chains; and the sale of knives and acids.
Councils support the important objectives underpinning the new regulations that are being introduced. However, rather than individual departments developing new policies and burdens assessments in isolation, there is a need for a cross-government view about the overall demands on these services, recognition of the extent to which local services are already having to prioritise and target their activities towards the most critical issues, and therefore realism about what can be delivered given the resources available to local regulatory services. Unless the impact assessments attached to new duties enable councils to employ more staff, the funding identified by them will be of no use in practically supporting councils to fulfil these new responsibilities in addition to their existing ones, with the result that either these important policies will simply not be delivered, or another important activity will have to be stopped to accommodate the new work.
Training and recruitment
Whilst funding to carry out additional work can help with some measures to quickly bolster capacity (for example, through backfilling posts and agency staff), recent work on both COVID-19 and EU transition has highlighted that there is limited scope to quickly and significantly boost the regulatory workforce. Existing staff levels and demographics within the services, combined with the future pipeline of officers, create serious concerns about the future resilience of the services.
There is an urgent need for investment in recruitment and training to ensure that TS and EH services, and other smaller council services, are sustainable in the long term. The ageing workforce within the services creates the prospect of potential skills shortages in the future, but the number of trainees entering the professions is arguably insufficient to mitigate this risk. Obtaining professional qualifications takes time and resources, so steps must be taken now to address this issue going forward.
CTSI’s latest workforce survey highlights that low numbers of planned trainee posts and falling training budgets mean that maintaining skills and preparing for the future was seen as a challenge for many services. Equally there is not a large cohort of EH students or trainees that could be quickly brought into the workforce.
Training and qualification : There are around 65 graduates coming off CIEH accredited courses every year. One hundred and forty five environmental health practitioners (EHPs) became fully qualified last year (2019) and 339 in the past three years (2017-19).
The average time that it takes for an EHP to become fully qualified is around five years (three years for the accredited course and two years to do professional practice assessments).
According the
CTSI Workforce Survey 2018-2019, more than a third of trading standards officers have over 20 year’s post-qualification experience, with 12 per cent of the workforce having less than five years’ experience. This confirms that an ageing trading standards workforce is a threat to future professional capacity, a concern expressed by many of the heads of service interviewed.
Whilst there remains a great deal of experience within the trading standards profession, at the time of the survey there were only 50 trainee trading standards officers currently in post, and 21 planned for 2019/20. This may reflect the lack of funding for training, with the average training budget per service being less than 2 per cent. Seventy per cent of heads of service were, however, interested in appointing an apprentice.