Illegal cigarette shops escape justice due to cost

Shop owners who sell counterfeit cigarettes can escape legal penalties due to the cost of taking them to court.

Bradford Council's licensing panel members were told that West Yorkshire Trading Standards cannot afford to prosecute every retailer who sells illegal goods due to strained funds.

Instead its officers had to use measures such as seizing products to try to deter rogue vendors.

The panel was holding a licence review into 263 Allerton Road, known as Fresh Market, and was told the business had been caught selling illegal cigarettes on four occasions in six months.

Jason Bethell, from Trading Standards, said: "We don't have the resources.

"We can only really prosecute the biggest seizures.

"We have to fund any action through private prosecutions, and we only have a limited budget to do that.

"We've had some cases where defendants and lawyers have dragged it on for several years and we have to spend thousands on barristers' bills."

He was replying to a question from councillor Martin Love (Green, Shipley) who asked if there had been any prosecutions relating to the Fresh Market case.

Bethell said in some cases defendants had sold their shops by the time the case came to court and were therefore unemployed.

This meant that after lengthy court cases, defendants could sometimes end up with a fine of as little as £120.

He said: "Other times there are questions over ownership - that is a typical ploy to avoid prosecution."

Panel members were told Trading Standards often go down other means to punish owners of offending businesses.

These include seizures of the goods, which are often worth tens of thousands of pounds, and revoking their alcohol licence.

But even if an alcohol licence was revoked, there are no powers to prevent the shop from continuing to sell legal tobacco products.

The panel voted to revoke the shop's licence.

An update on the work of Trading Standards was given at a separate meeting of the council's corporate scrutiny committee.

Andy Robson, from West Yorkshire Joint Services, agreed that more funding should be made available to take more shop owners who broke the law to court.

In the meantime he said they had to "take a different approach" and try to remove products from those retailers to "hit them financially".

Robson said: "That can be a lot more significant than a £120 fine. It is having an impact.

"In some cases we can close a business for three months.

"Acts like this have far more of an impact on people involved in this illegal activity."

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