Business and the consumer landscape

TSI has a very good relationship with the business community and its representative organisations. This mirrors the trading standards ethic of being a shared champion of business and consumers. Our TSI Annual Conference and Exhibition (in 2011 at the Bournemouth International Centre 21-23 June) is a high impact affair and any visitor would immediately see the support it and we enjoy from the broad spectrum of the private enterprise sector together with those in the public and third sectors.

This Government has staked the country's economic and employment prospects on business and it is important that the sector plays its fullest part in how we progress and implement the BIS plans for the new consumer landscape including driving new levels of consumer empowerment via advice, information, education and ensuring competition flourishes and rogues are eliminated from local and national markets. Trading standards is central to all this and business will be as concerned as consumers to see that local trading standards services are not themselves dis empowered by cuts by councils to their already stretched budgets.

So yesterday I started to widen my discussions with business on the importance of it being the third pillar in the new consumer landscape being scoped by Vince Cable and his BIS team. Trading standards and Citizens Advice may be the two pillars he has so far spotlighted but business has to be embraced as the third if the new model is to work. I am sure that business will be up for the challenge and in the week that saw both the Prime Minister and Opposition Leader at a CBI Conference it is worth reiterating the Prime Minister's and the Chancellor's clarion call that 'we are all in this together'.