CLAIrE nOrMAn / SHuTTErSTOCk News Firms fined total of 168,000 for selling unsafe cosmetic products Firework traders given community orders Traders who sold fireworks they were not licensed to stock have been given community orders, after being prosecuted by Staffordshire County Council. Trading standards officers visited Elite Fireworks in Lichfield in October and November 2015, and found powerful fireworks were being sold without a licence. Iain Crow and Paul Lyon pleaded guilty to eight offences for breaching the Explosives Regulations 2014, and one offence under the Health and Safety at Work Act. In November 2015, officers also visited Lakeside Stores in Tamworth, where fireworks were being sold without the correct licence. Store owners Aaron Dhaliwal and Charanjeev Purewal pleaded guilty to three offences for breaching regulations. The four men were each ordered to serve 12-month community orders, with a requirement to complete 200 hours of unpaid work, pay a 60 victim surcharge and 1,211 costs. Cosmetic businesses across the capital were fined a total of 168,579 in 2016 for dealing in unsafe cosmetic products. A coordinated campaign by London Trading Standards (LTS) seized thousands of skin-lightening products containing dangerous and prohibited levels of hydroquinone, mercury or corticosteroids. Safety regulations prohibit these ingredients in cosmetics because their prolonged use can result in a host of health problems, from skin-thinning and discoloration to organ damage and even cancer. One product contained 18 per cent of the bleaching agent hydroquinone. This is believed to be the highest amount ever found by trading standards in such products. Labelling breaches and lack of traceability were also issues. As a result of the campaign, five London boroughs prosecuted a total of 17 individual directors from 15 firms. The average penalty was 11,239. However, illegal sales dont just occur on the high street. Research conducted for London Trading Standards Regional Intelligence Service identified at least 15 online sellers of prohibited skin-lightening products. Work is now being done to locate and tackle these sellers, and officers in Waltham Forest recently seized more than 3,000 products from one such seller; an investigation is ongoing. Steve Playle, from LTS, said: These penalties should make shop owners who are tempted to ignore safety rules think twice before putting profit before the health and safety of their customers. LTS has a duty to enforce product safety rules, but ever-shrinking officer numbers and reduced budgets make it an ever-more challenging job particularly with competing priorities such as rogue traders, doorstep crime, fake goods and underage sales, he added. Despite these difficulties, our teams remain determined to tackle the issues putting Londoners at risk. We will be checking more online sellers to ensure such damaging products are not being made available. Fraud now most commonly experienced crime, survey shows [These] figures demonstrate how crime has changed, with fraud now the most commonly experienced offence. In the past, burglary and theft of vehicles were the highvolume crimes driving trends, but their numbers have fallen substantially since then. Meanwhile, the Intellectual Property Office has published the latest fast facts about Ip and its importance to the UK economy. The report includes results from the 2015/16 IP Crime Survey of Trading Standards, which shows that, in 2014/15, officials detained 1.6m consignments of intellectual property rights-infringing goods at the UK border with a value in excess of 56m. It also highlights the main crimes probed by trading standards and those with links to IP crime. rAWPIxEL.COM / SHuTTErSTOCk For the first time, the Office for National Statistics (ONS) has included cyber crime in its annual Crime Survey for England and Wales, which has seen total crime figures soar to 11.8 million incidents. There were an estimated 3.6 million cases of fraud and two million computer misuse offences in the year to September 2016. John Flatley, from the ONS, said: PhD looks at impact of trading standards A new PhD research project looking at the impact of trading standards on economic growth is being offered by the Lord Ashcroft International Business School (LAIBS), at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, in response to calls from CTSI for research in this area. Since the Hampton Report (2005) which recommended that regulators use risk assessment to inform their work better and free up resources to support business, rather than simply enforce regulations trading standards services have embraced this new approach, through routes like Primary Authority partnerships, local enterprise partnerships (LEP), and one-to-one advice. However, there has been no assessment of the specific impact of trading standards on businesses especially in light of the multiple changes that have occurred in the past 10 years and very little research looking at the effect these new working relationships have had on economic growth, and on keeping markets free of rogue elements. There is growing concern that this lack of evidence will reduce the value of offering advice within business-support relationships, as officers become less experienced or more stretched, thereby reducing the overall value of trading standards work. Applications for the full-time PhD studentship, Investigating the impact of trading standards interventions on small firm economic growth, need to be submitted by 13 February 2017. The successful candidate will be expected to enrol in the PhD programme in April 2017, completing their studies in March 2020. Further information is available from supervising staff Professor Simon Down, Dr David Arkell and Lewis Walsh. Toast warning could be a step too far The Food Standards Agencys (FSA) advice to avoid over-cooking food products such as bread, potatoes and chips has been met with mixed reactions. The new campaign aims to raise public awareness of acrylamide, the chemical produced when starchy foods are roasted, fried or grilled for too long at high temperatures. Research has linked consumption of acrylamide to an increased risk of cancer in mice, but many including Cancer Research UK and David Spiegelhalter, professor of the public understanding of risk at the University of Cambridge have questioned whether this is sufficient evidence for creating a new campaign, and whether doing so reduces the impact of other health priorities, such as tackling obesity. Steve Wearne, director of policy at the FSA, said: Although there is more to know about the true extent of the acrylamide risk, there is an important job for government, industry and others to do to help reduce acrylamide intake. Online dating scams hit record high The number of people defrauded in the UK by online dating scams reached a record high in 2016, the BBCs Victoria Derbyshire programme has learned. According to the National Fraud Intelligence Bureau, there were 3,889 victims of so-called romance fraud, who last year handed over a record 39m. One of the people featured on the programme is Judith Lathlean, a university professor from Hampshire. She was conned by a man she met on an online dating website. They seemed a perfect match and got friendly very quickly. Not long after, he contacted her needing help, claiming to have lost his passport while on a business trip in South Africa. The emails started getting a bit frantic, and the phone calls, she said. And I immediately because I was so believing in him said, Dont worry John, I can loan you some money. There was a total, eventually, of 54,000 for that particular part of the scam. Action Fraud, the UKs cybercrime reporting centre, says it receives more than 350 reports of such scams a month.