Consumer protection

Status / emerging findings

• Consumer detriment has tripled from £25 billion (2014–15) to £71 billion currently, spanning unsafe goods, fake product cancellations, non-delivered services, and systematic quality failures.
• Trading standards funding cut by 39% over 15 years; officers now enforce ~300 pieces of legislation with skeleton crews, creating enforcement blindspots on high streets and in sectors like used cars and home improvements.
• Market concentration masked by false choice: veterinary practices with different brands owned by same company, enabling coordinated pricing without appearing anticompetitive.
• No national data exists on what individual trading standards officers are doing—fragmentation between local and national enforcement prevents coordinated action against systemic abuses.

Why it matters

Whether consumer protection enforcement is broken matters because £71 billion in annual detriment affects household finances, trust in markets, and fair competition—and fixing it requires either more funding or structural reform.

Tone arc

Opening session set a critical tone from the outset: witnesses (Citizens Advice, Which?, trading standards representatives) united around a narrative of regulatory system failure rather than market forces alone.

Key witnesses

Anne Pardoe, Rocio Concha (Citizens Advice), John Herriman, David MacKenzie