Trading Standards Services

This page describes the range of services that Wrexham County Borough Council Trading Standards provides, plus links to an online questions form and an online views and comments form.

Business Advice

We provide advice to businesses to help them comply with the law. A comprehensive list of business advice leaflets covering all aspects of the legislation that we enforce can be obtained from www.tradingstandards.gov.uk.

If you have any specific questions you wish to ask us please use the Your Questions online form available on this website.

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Consumer Direct Wales (CDW)

CDW advise, assist and educate consumers to help them buy wisely and take action on faulty goods and services, a comprehensive list of guidance notes and leaflets can be obtained from www.consumerdirect.gov.uk and www.tradingstandards.gov.uk.

CDW is your initial point of contact for consumer related issues, however, if more detailed assistance is required CDW will refer the details of your complaint through to the Wrexham Trading Standards Division for an Advisory Officer or Enforcement Officer to investigate.

1. How Your Complaint Is Investigated By Trading Standards

On receipt of a referral from CDW, we will contact you within 2 working days to confirm we have your information, if we are unable to reach you by phone a letter will be sent to you asking for you to contact an officer. In some cases we may be able to answer your query immediately and provide comprehensive advice to help you in the next stage of your enquiry. Alternatively it may be necessary to view your documents and terms and conditions.

You may be advised to contact a more suitable organisation who are better equipped to help e.g. Energywatch for problems with gas and electricity or Office of Communications (OFCOM) for telephone billing queries.

We may contact the trader to try and negotiate an acceptable outcome. This is not possible in every situation.

You may need to obtain expert advice at some stage to support your claim. You would be responsible for any fee charged by the expert.

If negotiations fail you may decide to take action through the Civil Courts. Claims for £5,000 or less are normally dealt with on the Small Claims Track. There is a fee to pay which would be your responsibility. We can help and advise with the preparation of Court documents.

Our service is free.

2. What You Can Do To Help

• Tell us all the facts of your complaint with complete honesty

• Provide any documentation we request as quickly as possible

• Listen to and act on our advice - we are trying to help you

• Ask us to explain or clarify anything you're not sure about

• Accept that investigations can take time

• Accept that we may not always be able to resolve the problem for you

• Respect our staff who are doing a difficult and often contentious job

3. What We Are Unable To Do

• Investigate problems that are outside the scope of our service or that we feel are unjustified or unreasonable

• Focus solely on an individual enquiry or comlaint - we handle around 4,000 each year

• Demand an apology or a refund or insist that a trader resolves the matter for you

• Trace traders who do not provide full addresses or who have moved out of the area

• Recommend individual traders to you

• Change the law - we must work within current legislation

4. Fequently Asked Questions

Please also see Frequently Asked Questions about Trading Standards

5. Consumer Support Pack

This pack contains information about a number of consumer related issues such as:

• Buying goods and services
• Buying on credit
• Warranties and guarantees
• Package holidays
• Cancellation rights and doorstep sales
• How to complain in person and in writing
• Using an expert
  

Consumer Support Pack

You may wish to download the whole pack or just specific pages to help you with your complaint. The pack is available in the following formats:

Consumer Support Pack - MS Word format 241Kb

Consumer Support Pack - PDF format 807Kb

Consumer Support Pack - Plain Text format 1.2Mb

6. Contacting Consumer Direct Wales

Telephone: 08454 04 05 06

Email: www.consumerdirect.gov.uk/contact

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Calibration Service

We offer a comprehensive calibration service for businesses and offer calibrations to M1 accuracy in the range 1mg - 25kg.

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Licences and Application Forms

We are responsible for licensing the storage of fireworks, explosives, petroleum (including petroleum mixtures), poisons, nurses agencies and animal movements (as part of the Animal Movement Licensing System). 

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Your Questions

We welcome questions about the service, and legislation we enforce from consumers and the business community, normally we can only assist residents and traders from Wrexham. 

Please use the Your Questions online form available on this website.

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Your Views

Trading Standards undertake a wide range of tasks to protect consumers and help businesses.  We would like to know your views on our service, recent initiatives and how we should be developing the service. 

To tell us your views, please use the Your Views online form available on this website.