Oxfordshire County Council’s trading standards team is encouraging caution if anyone knocks and offers to start work immediately, particularly if they are pushy or claim that urgent repairs are required. Each year, springtime and the start of the growing season results in an increase in offers to assist with gardening.
Here are some top tips from Oxfordshire County Council’s trading standards team:

• If it is out of the blue, it’s not for you! Don’t agree to work from an unsolicited, cold call.
• Be aware of ‘alarm bell’ tactics, claims such as – ‘I was working in the area and saw that your garden/roof needed urgent attention’; ‘we are working at one of your neighbours’ and we have some material left over’; ‘I can take you to the bank/cashpoint to get the money’.
• Take five to stop fraud. Taking a moment to stop and think before parting with your money or information could keep you safe. Trust your instincts.
• If you want some work undertaken, get a number of detailed quotes in writing, including full contact details and a detailed breakdown of exactly what work will be done.
• Be cautious about any requests for large deposits. For larger work, agree when staged payments will be paid and what work should be completed before any money is handed over. And stick to what is agreed.
• Check with friends and family for trusted recommendations and consider a trading standards’ approved trader, from the Buy with Confidence scheme.
• Consider learning more about how scams work and how you can protect yourself and others, by becoming a Friend Against Scam.

For more advice on consumer rights, or to report a rogue trader to trading standards, contact the Citizens Advice national consumer helpline on 0808 223 1133 or by visiting its website citizensadvice.org.uk.


More details and the full press release - Residents warned about rogue traders posing as gardeners and roofers in Oxfordshire 

Oxfordshire County Council are currently conducting a study to investigate the feasibility of area based weight restrictions.

In this engagement activity, we are inviting local stakeholders to share their views on where there are existing or potential future challenges with inappropriate Heavy Goods Vehicle (HGV) movements to help inform the study.

​Background
The county council adopted a new Freight and Logistics Strategy alongside the Local Transport and Connectivity Plan (LTCP) in July 2022. The Freight and Logistics Strategy provides more detail about the challenges associated with the movement of goods in the county, key principles and actions. Work is currently ongoing to progress the actions in the strategy.
The Freight and Logistics Strategy outlines that one of our priorities for local goods movement is to encourage use of the most appropriate HGV routes. In order to achieve this some action will be required, including restricting HGV traffic in exceptional circumstances.
Traditionally, this has been through point based weight restrictions. These are weight restrictions on individual roads or structures such as bridges. However, we have found that in many cases this approach does not address the issues with inappropriate HGV movement. This approach often causes HGVs to move onto surrounding roads creating a new issue elsewhere. An example of this was the Burford Experimental Traffic Restriction Order (ETRO), which is set out on pages 30-31 of the Freight and Logistics Strategy.
The Freight and Logistics Strategy therefore made the commitment to explore an area based approach to weight restrictions (action 10). This approach will consider how we can keep HGVs on appropriate routes across larger geographic areas to reduce freight traffic in our towns and villages and stop issues being moved from one road to another.
The first step in this process is conducting an area weight restriction study. This will assess feasibility and set out a proposed countywide approach. It is important that we conduct this countywide piece of work first to set out a consistent approach and consider the potential impacts of any restriction.
To help inform the study we would like to capture local stakeholder views about where there are existing challenges with inappropriate HGV movements. These suggestions will be one piece of evidence used, we are also analysing a range of data to ensure the outputs are evidence based.
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Area weight restrictions - stakeholder engagement | Let's Talk Oxfordshire