Enforcement and Service Delivery Outputs
The Ministry of Consumer Affairs also undertakes a range of compliance and service delivery functions through the Measurement and Product Safety Service and parts of the Research, Information and Capability Group.
Measurement and Product Safety
The Measurement and Product Safety Service administers the Weights and Measures Act and aspects of the product safety provisions of the Fair Trading Act 1986.
- On measurement issues, the Service (or a person accredited to undertake this activity) carries out spot checks of weighing and measuring equipment, checks the weight of pre-packaged goods and investigates complaints from the public. The Service works in an advisory capacity with business to help find ways of accurately measuring product that is sold by weight or volume.
- On product safety issues, the Service investigates unsafe products and suggests modifications to make products safe, requests that unsafe products are removed from sale, gives advice to companies recalling unsafe products and helps develop self-regulation options. It can also recommend that the Minister of Consumer Affairs recall, ban or make mandatory safety standards for unsafe products. The Commerce Commission enforces the six mandatory safety standards.
The Service also seeks to assist New Zealand businesses to compete internationally by reducing measurement and product safety-related technical barriers to trade. This is achieved through, amongst other things, membership of international, Asia/Pacific and trans-Tasman standards-making bodies and committees.
Next Three Years
The Ministry of Consumer Affairs, like a number of consumer agencies in other jurisdictions, faces challenges and limitations in its ability to enforce and ensure compliance with legislation in the areas of trade measurement and product safety. These limitations are due to a lack of resources available to undertake these activities. When fully staffed, the Ministry has a total of 18 people to deal with trade measurement and product safety activities nation-wide.
While most businesses are responsible and are aware of their legal obligations, others do not willingly operate within the law. The types of businesses and enforcement and compliance activities with these businesses fall into three general categories:
- Well informed and well intentioned - These businesses are aware of and understand their legal obligations and the need to operate within the law. The Ministry needs to adopt a light-handed enforcement and compliance strategy with these types of businesses.
- Ill informed and well intentioned - These businesses may not be aware of and/or understand their legal obligations, but would operate within the law. We need to adopt an education and information enforcement and compliance strategy with these types of businesses.
- Well informed and ill intentioned - These are rogue traders who have no intention of complying with their legal requirements. We need to adopt a planned and concerted enforcement and compliance strategy with these types of businesses.
One of the key challenges we face in this area is how we prioritise enforcement activities to put our efforts and emphasis into identifying and dealing effectively with the rogue traders, especially when they can be hard to find and tend to operate outside the traditional retail environment.
Providing Information and Advice
The Ministry, through its partnerships with a range of community agencies, most notably the Citizens Advice Bureaux, provides advice and guidance to members of the public on the full range of consumer issues. These agencies are trained on an annual basis and provided with a detailed manual which allows them to answer most standard queries. Through a free phone line operated by our Research, Information and Capability Group, we provide assistance to the community agencies where they encounter a more difficult question or issue.
Consumer groups often prefer receiving information from members of their own community. To reach certain vulnerable groups of consumers, we therefore seek to develop existing community agencies' capability to provide consumer information and advice. For example, over the last year we have been developing relationships with a number of new migrant support groups in order to assess their capability to provide information and advice to new migrant consumers.
Next Three Years
Key challenges in this area are:
- assisting largely voluntary agencies to develop their capability to deliver services, while ensuring that they do not become dependent on our input
- finding new and smarter ways of dealing with the steadily increasing levels of electronic requests for information from members of the public
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