A-Z of Services

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

Consumer Information & Business Guidance

We provide advice to businesses to help them comply with the law.

The ts broadcast system provides a tailor made advice pack for your business. Simply answer the questions below and the system will then generate a list of topics about your area(s) of interest.

By checking the boxes beside the trading standards subjects which interest you, you can select the most relevant areas. These will be saved into one file which makes it easy for you to save or print the information which matters to you. The information is regularly updated by experts at the Trading Standards Institute (external link).

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)

Consumer Information & Business Guidance

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.adviceguide.org.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 complaint - 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. Frequently 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

To view and print PDF files, you must have Adobe® Acrobat® Reader installed.

Link on the Adobe logo to download the software.

Adobe Acrobat documents can be converted back to plain text using Accessible Adobe® Reader.

To view and print Microsoft Word files, you must either have Microsoft Word installed on your computer, or you can download free Microsoft Word Viewer software.

Link on the logo to download the software

6. Contacting Consumer Direct Wales

Telephone: 08454 04 05 06

Email: www.adviceguide.org.uk/wales.htm

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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.

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