Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of funding for the enforcement of trading standards.
The Department provides funding to National Trading Standards (NTS) and Trading Standards Scotland (TSS), to enable local authorities to take coordinated action specifically on consumer harm issues that cross local authority boundaries; for instance, doorstep crime and mass-marketing scams. We have provided a single enforcement grant of £12,027,000 to National Trading Standards and £1,215,000 to Trading Standards Scotland for financial year 2021/22. We keep the funding needs of both organisations under constant review.