Please provide, for the period 1 January 2015 to the date of your search:
- The number of complaints, reports or referrals received relating to fenestration products or installations (including windows, doors, and conservatories).
The data given in response to this request relates to the Heart of the South West Trading Standards area which includes the areas covered by Devon County Council, Plymouth City Council (since April 2021), Somerset Council and Torbay Council (since May 2017).
Please note that complaints of this nature are categorised on our Trading Standards database into types of goods and services. The categorisation is usually undertaken by staff at the Citizens Advice Consumer Service, when they record details of complaints that they receive via the national phone line, which operates as the “front door” for Trading Standards Services across the country.
The Citizens Advice Service usually pass on complaints to local Trading Standards Services for the consumer and the business, via a connector that sends them directly into the local Trading Standards service’s database. The Heart of the South West Trading Standards Service can pick a different category if the adviser has made a mistake. However, categories come from a set list that all services and the Citizens Advice Service use.
There is a group header for “Glazing Products and Installations”, which we have used in this instance to collate the statistics you have asked for. That includes individual codes for “Glazing Services”, “Double Glazing” and “Conservatories”. We have run a report for all complaints from 1/1/15 and this has identified 1504 entries on our complaints database”.
- A count of any investigations, enforcement actions, or prosecutions arising from those complaints.
DCC is not able to provide detail on the number of “investigations” undertaken by our Trading Standards Services. This is because we do not have a specific definition of what actions constitute a formal investigation, as what constitutes an investigation could include various actions by a Trading Standards Officer, including telephoning or writing to a business, through to the more formal prosecution actions (details of which have been provided).
When deciding on whether formal prosecution actions and warnings are given, a Trading Standards Officer is required to discharge reasonable professional judgement as to whether the conduct that is the subject of consideration, is in breach of Consumer Protection Legislation and would otherwise meet the threshold required for prosecution. The same would apply to judgements regarding actions that might be considered necessary following receipt of a complaint or concerns.
Given that DCC does not hold a formal definition of what constitutes an investigation, and we do not specifically record the number of investigations undertaken, the Council believes that information regarding “investigations” in the context of your request, is not held for the purposes of Section 3(2) of the FOIA.
In the interests of providing you with advice and assistance, we can confirm that we do hold information regarding criminal prosecutions and enforcement. This detail is included below.
- 3 Convictions
- 1 Service Warning Letter
- 5 Ongoing investigations.
- Any references within your records to FENSA, BBA, BFRC, or other fenestration certification schemes.
Please note that DCC cannot provide definitive statistics relating to complaints that refer to FENSA, BBA, BFRC, or other fenestration certification schemes within our Trading Standards records. This is because to do so would require a Trading Standards Officer to manually review all 1504 records which we have identified as relating to “Glazing products and installations”. I am informed that we are not able to run a specific report for this information as the specific information you have asked for is not recorded with our case management systems in a manner that enables an automated report to be run. Therefore the only way of extracting this information from our systems will be to manually review all the records stored within our Trading Standards Case Management systems and extract this manually.
The extraction of this information will require a Trading Standards Officer to manually review each case, review whether it references any of the accreditations outlined in your request, record any that do, and then compile this in response.
We estimate that this would take on average 5 minutes per case. As such, we believe it could take up to 125 hours to confirm or deny, and then provide the information you have asked for.
In the interest of proving you with advice and assistance under the FOIA, I can confirm that our Trading Standards Service have now run a keyword search using keywords “FENSA”, “BBA”, “BSI”, “UKAS” and “BFRC” within our Trading Standards systems. I am told that the keyword search does not look in all the available fields within our Trading Standards database. Therefore, we cannot state with certainty that this search will have retrieved all information held within this system. However, based on the keyword searches undertaken, we have established the following statistics, that are provided below in the interest of providing you with advice and assistance:
- 22 complaints mentioned FENSA
- 5 complaints mentioned BBA
- 2 complaints mentioned BFRC
- No relevant mentions of UKAS or BSI.
- If any complaints or referrals relating to Anglian Windows Ltd (or associated trading entities) originated outside your authority area and were referred to another Trading Standards service, please indicate the destination authority and, if held, the number of such cases.
DCC cannot confirm or deny whether the specific information you have requested about complaints or referrals regardin Windows is held. This is because to do so would reveal information that is exempt under Section 44 of the FOIA. The reasons for this are outlined below.
Section 237 of the Enterprise Act 2002 prohibits disclosure of “specified information” relating to the affairs of an individual or business which has been obtained by a public authority in connection with the discharge of certain statutory functions (including enforcement under consumer protection legislation). Disclosures are only permitted through specific statutory gateways in the Enterprise Act 2002. The use of the FOIA is not one of those gateways.
I have reviewed the specific information that you have asked for, regarding complaints or referrals about Anglian Windows. It is my assessment that the specific information you have asked for does constitute specified information under Section 237 of the Enterprise Act 2002 for the following reasons:
- Information regarding complaints and referrals about Anglian Windows would constitute information which relates to a business in accordance with Section 237(1)(b) of the Enterprise Act 2002.
- If the information were held, it would have been obtained by the DCC Trading Standards Service as part of formal enforcement activities regulated by the legislation listed under Schedule 14 of the Enterprise Act 2002.
On the grounds that if this information were held, it would constitute specified information, I have gone on to consider whether there is a legal gateway permitting disclosure. Having reviewed the legal gateways allowing disclosure of specified information listed under Part 9 of the Enterprise Act 2002, we are not minded to consider there are grounds to support the disclosure of this information in response to your FOI request.