Your data: Trading Standards complaints, investigations and advice

Why and how we use your information

Aberdeen City Council has a statutory duty to enforce various consumer protection and trading standards statutes which are designed to protect and promote the health, safety and economic wellbeing of residents and the businesses in the city and in so doing, the wider community beyond our boundaries.

Trading Standards also provides advice to consumers and businesses on their rights and responsibilities under these laws. These cover:

• Fair Trading including the supply, pricing and description of goods and services
• Intellectual Property
• Weights and Measures
• Product Safety
• The Sale of Age Restricted Products such as Tobacco, electronic cigarettes (Nicotine vaping products), and Fireworks 
• Tobacco & Nicotine Vaping Products Registration & Display
• Petroleum and Explosives Licensing

If you contact us to register a complaint or to ask for our advice, we will make a record of the information you give us, including your name, your address and the nature of the complaint, to allow us to carry out a comprehensive investigation of the issue you have raised with us and to keep a record of any advice we provided you with. This will also allow us to take the appropriate enforcement action, where necessary. 

If you provide us with information, or we have received information about you from a third party, we will use the information provided, and may gather more from internal services such as Housing or Council Tax, for example.  More information about the third parties that we receive information from is available in the table below.

Who we share personal information with

Where it is permitted by law, or necessary to carry out our statutory function, we will share your information with the Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal’s Service, Food Standards Scotland, Police Scotland, HM Revenue and Customs, the Health and Safety Executive, Other local authority Trading Standards, other enforcing authorities or other council services. More information about this is available in the table below.

How long we keep your information for

This information will be stored electronically, and in some instances in hard copy, which we will keep for ten years, after which time it will be deleted. If information provided relates to the storage of Petroleum Spirit this information will be held indefinitely, as is required by law. 

Your rights

You have rights in relation to your data, including the right to ask for a copy of it. See more information about all the rights you have and how they work in practice, as well as contact details for the Council’s Data Protection Officer. You also have the right to make a complaint to the Information Commissioner’s Office. They are the body responsible for making sure organisations like the Council handle your data properly.

Our legal basis

Aberdeen City Council is the Data Controller for this information.  Wherever we process personal information we must make sure we have a basis for doing so under Data Protection law. When we process your information to investigate criminal offences, our legal basis for processing is Part 3 of the Data Protection Act 2018. This is because we are Competent Authority due to our statutory functions to enforce Consumer Protection and Trading Standards legislation. 

In other situations, where are investigating civil breaches, our legal basis for processing your data is because it is part of our public task as a local authority under Consumer Protection and Trading Standards legislation. 

More information about each of the processing activities we undertake and our legal bases for them are outlined in the table below: 

Legal basis for processing