About us

Kent Trading Standards aims to make Kent a better place to live and do business. We enforce a wide range of legislation to protect the consumer, ensure that businesses compete on a "level playing field" and to control farm animal welfare and disease.  

This page tells you about the way we work. The links on the left will help you find out more about our activities, aims, priorities and performance. Take a look at Kent TV to see our officers at work. (Broadband required).

The way we work

We operate from two Area Offices, at West Malling and Ashford, each managed by an Area Manager. Our Advice and Education team is also based at Ashford. The Head of Trading Standards is based at Invicta House, County Hall, Maidstone together with a small team providing legal expertise and administrative and operational support.

We have an "intelligence led" approach to all our work and use campaigns to find out the extent of a problem or to target known problems. This benefits the whole community by concentrating our activities on those issues causing the most problems. It means we rarely investigate individual complaints about traders, but we do record all information supplied to us as this is a vital part of our intelligence gathering.

We liaise with other Trading Standards Services throughout the country to ensure a consistent approach to enforcement. Trading Standards enforcement staff also work closely with Police, Customs and other enforcement agencies; State Veterinary Service and other staff of DEFRA; the Office of Fair Trading, the Health and Safety Executive, etc.

Each year we produce a Business Plan. This sets out the activities we plan to carry out during the year. We also produce an Enforcement Policy and Food Service Plan (a separate requirement of the Food Standards Agency). You can find these and other documents in our publications section.