Uniform Trading Standards

Delivering smarter consumer protection services.

Reports and complaints about unsatisfactory goods or services may reach your authority directly or via Consumer Direct. Either way, your trading standards department must fulfil its consumer protection obligations professionally and efficiently. Help them do so with a solution that captures and integrates information from different sources to build accurate pictures of the actions of traders.

How Uniform Trading Standards can help

Your trading standards officers will be able to:

Optimise management of complaints, enquiries, business advice, investigations, sampling and technical services.
Facilitate the risk assessment process and inspection cycle through automated procedures.
Avoid duplication of effort through integration with Consumer Direct and with other Uniform solutions.
Enhance productivity with service-request allocation and automated diary scheduling.
Easily generate required statutory reporting outputs.

Comprehensive trader information

You can create a register for storing and maintaining reference data about traders in your area, using and adding to the definitive property data held in the gazetteer that underpins all Uniform solutions. As a result your trading standards officers can:

Build a complete picture of, and track, the long-term behaviour of a business or trader. This includes the ability to attach sampling information to records.
Associate licensing information held in the Uniform Licensing solution with the trader's entry in the register, without duplicating any data.

Automated risk assessment

Your officers can use Uniform Trading Standards to initiate risk inspection cycles and record responses and scores following the LACORS scheme. Calculation of risk is automated, which makes it easy for your officers to assess risk and establish an appropriate schedule of inspection visits.

More effective action

Because Uniform Trading Standards enables structured coding of service requests, and addresses are integrated with the underlying gazetteer of property information, service requests can be automatically allocated to officers according to type and location. You can also measure how well your team is meeting target response timescales.

Integration with Consumer Direct

Uniform Trading Standards integrates with Consumer Direct and provides an inbox for your officers to receive notifications and referrals direct from the national team. These referrals can also be linked to service requests your team receives directly, avoiding duplication of effort in handling related issues and complaints.

Further details about Uniform Trading Standards can be found in our brochure which is available for download.