About Environmental Health and Trading Standards
Mission Statement
Our aim is to protect and enhance the health, welfare, environment, safety and trading market places of the people of West Lothian and those using the services obtained from within West Lothian.
Requesting a service
If you require assistance from environmental health or trading standards please use any of the methods of contact detailed on this page. Your request will be logged and passed to an appropriate officer for their attention and response. We aim to respond to 85% of all enquiries within 2 working days however we have to prioritise our response based on the nature of the enquiry and available staff resource. This means that in some cases the response time will be longer. (Some enquiries such as licensing, planning and information requests will receive responses within 10 to 20 working days.)
Service Performance
The performance standards of the service are monitored and reported internally and externally through a number of different processes. The service is accountable to council management and elected members, as well as a number of external agencies, including Scottish Government, Food Standards Scotland, and Health and Safety Executive who require annual performance returns to be made. The service is also benchmarked against other local authority services.
Service performance information is also provided in service delivery reports which are produced twice a year. These can be found on this page in the download section below.
Customer confidentiality
We appreciate that a number of people may be concerned about making requests for the service to investigate complaints about another individual or business operation in case their details are passed on. It is not council policy to provide details of those requesting assistance to any other party as part of a routine investigation. For more information please see our information sheet (PDF, 123 KB)(opens new window).
Environmental Health does not accept anonymous requests for service or notifications of concern. These do not allow us to get more information, confirm how reliable the information or source of information is, or update the person raising the concern.
Trading Standards accepts anonymous information.
Data Protection
We take the security of your information and its legal use seriously. Information is held in accordance with the Data Protection Act. We do not hold information unnecessarily. Information is retained for appropriate periods of time in accordance with statutory requirements and internal retention policies (PDF, 57 KB)(opens new window). For information on what information we hold and the arrangements for its removal from our records, please see our Privacy Statement (PDF, 68 KB)(opens new window).
For more general information on the council's approach to data protection and relevant documents, please see Data Protection and GDPR.
Please note that there may be specific legal situations where such information will be required, for example in court.
Fees and Charges
Environmental Health & Trading Standards charge for various services. Please see our Fees and charges (PDF, 107 KB)(opens new window) .
Formal Enforcement Action
We always try to solve problems. We will therefore usually try hard to resolve matters informally before resorting to using our legal powers. Our Enforcement Policy (PDF, 365 KB)(opens new window) gives information on how, when and why we will take formal action using our legal powers.
