Trading Standards

Local Business Partnership

The Barking and Dagenham Local Business Partnership was launched on 27 January 2004 at CEME (Centre for Engineering and Manufacturing Excellence), providing businesses in the borough with a new way to understand their regulatory responsibilities.

The partnership provides a single point of contact for all businesses within Barking and Dagenham for all issues dealing with enforcement and support. There are regular events planned throughout the year dealing with particular issues faced by local businesses.

At these events it offers opportunities not only for business-to-business networking but more importantly face-to-face contact with all the agencies dealing with businesses.

The government created the Local Business Partnership initiative, in recognition of the fact that businesses did not find it easy to identify whom they needed to contact regarding regulatory services to ensure compliance. Also businesses were unaware of the support that was available to them from both us and external agencies.

Local Business Partnerships bring together all the agencies in order to provide a localised service that meets business needs, in terms of support, advice and regulation.

These partnerships will ease the way for businesses to understand their regulatory responsibilities, help to cut unnecessary red tape, simplify enforcement actions and ensure that all businesses can compete with one another on the same level.

With the regulatory side made easier, it was felt that the same access should be available for business support agencies in order that businesses can access all funding, training and expert advice initiatives that are available to them.

The organisations included in our partnership are:

The partnership's aims include:

To help businesses to understand their responsibilities under regulations and so make it easier to comply
To cut out any unnecessary red tape when applying regulations to business
To simplify the enforcement of regulations
To ensure that businesses compete with one another on level terms
To provide a single point of contact for business regulation and business support

For more information about all of these projects, future events and initiatives please contact the Business Liaison Officer, Ron Olive, at the address shown.