Politics: the collapse of technical governance

By Richard North - March 21, 2026

Although the short cul-de-sac in which my house is situated was once a hive of industry (my house having been converted from a textile mill), it is now wholly residential and zoned as such for planning purposes.

Despite that, the owner of a large garden site at the top of the road has decided to sub-divide the plot, enclosing in one lot two former car garages which have been converted into a single building.

Without bothering even to apply for planning permission, he has now advertised the site as a rental commercial workshop, suitable for the motor trade or similar activity – with the prospect of noise, disturbance and more traffic on an already fragile unmade road.

The moment the estate agent sign went up, I contacted the council – Bradford MDC – to complain of this egregious planning breach. I have to say, though, that the initial response was not encouraging.

This came by e-mail telling me that the planning enforcement team had a “significant backlog” of new enquiries awaiting investigation and staff resources were currently “very limited”.

I was thus told that the Council would respond “in due course”, although “due to the volume of enquiries which the team receives”, this could “take up to three weeks”.

To be fair, the response actually only took two weeks, in the form of a letter attached to an e-mail. My “enquiry” had been allocated a reference number and would be investigated by the planning enforcement team as soon as possible.

That was the good news. But the letter went on to tell me that, while the council tried to deal with cases in the order in which they had been received, due to the number of enquiries received and the limited number of officers within the team, there was likely to be “a significant delay before the Council is able to progress your enquiry”.

Furthermore, I was warned, any attempt at progress-chasing would be futile. “Requests for updates within three months of the enquiry being registered may not be responded to”, I was sternly informed.

At first sight, this might be seen as a local glitch, with a hard-pressed council struggling to provide a full range of services. But, brought to life by Pete in a series of Substack articles, it appears that this is the tip of the iceberg, where we are seeing the collapse of technical services across the board, affecting not just my local authority but virtually every council in the country.

These include not only planning enforcement (and planning applications and building regulation approvals), but Cinderella services such as environmental health, trading standards, fire safety, housing standards and care home supervision.

Nor is the problem confined to local authority services. There have been persistent shortages of personnel and capacity in meat inspection services run by the Food Standards Agency at central government level.

Similarly, there have been long-term staffing and capacity challenges in the Health and Safety Executive, with reports of underfunding, pay constraints, and a “capacity and experience crisis” dating back to the 2010s–2020s. Factory Inspector numbers have declined significantly, contributing to fewer unannounced inspections.

In the health care sector, the Care Quality Commission (CQC) has encountered significant internal challenges, including a lack of clinical expertise among some inspectors, IT system problems, inconsistent assessments, and inspection levels well below pre-COVID norms. This has been detailed by Pete in a separate post.

The Environment Agency (EA) has also taken a hit, experiencing staff shortages leading to practical impacts, such as cancelling or delaying thousands of water quality tests (e.g., over 10,000 in spring 2025 due to lab staffing issues). Enforcement has been affected, with reports of downgrading pollution incidents without site visits and reduced permitting inspections.

Dealing with such issues, the first of Pete’s most recent pieces is headed “Britain’s slide into third-worldism”, where he starts by picking up on the topical issue of vape shops on the high street.

We can take a reasonably good guess as to why they actually exist, he writes, and it turns out (after the disastrous fire in Glasgow) that many of them are operating without proper registration.

Yet there is no fear of being caught because trading standards inspections have collapsed over the years. Data reveals that 36 trading standards services reported no criminal prosecutions during the 2023-24 financial year, with some teams having fewer than one member of staff per 100,000 people.

I am not going to replicate the entire content of the post here, but it is worth the time it takes to read it, representing a litany of woes afflicting technical governance in the UK.

This brings me to the second of Pete’s most recent pieces, where his stark headline reads: “A systemic collapse of technical governance”, recounting in more detail what amounts to a major – if hidden – crisis that has enormous and far-reaching consequences.

Amongst other things, he looks at local authority environmental health staff, where numbers have decreased by 32 percent between 2009 and 2019. Around 31 percent of local authorities have stopped some non-statutory “discretionary” services, including business advice, to focus on essential duties, with the same level of authorities reporting that the delivery of statutory duties is at risk.

This is exacerbated by a great many people leaving the specialist roles in enforcement who simply aren’t being replaced, for which there are complex reasons which are not amenable to easy or quick solutions. Pete goes into some of the issues which illustrate that the replacement funnel has essentially collapsed. Even if the money was available, there aren’t the staff qualified to do the jobs.

The same malaise affects trading standards, where the Society of Chief Officers for Trading Standards in Scotland (Scotss) notes that this year is the first time it has registered fewer than 250 officers. Scotss represents the 31 trading standards departments in local authorities all over Scotland.

In its latest survey it reported that 60 percent of staff are now over 50 and that there are “very low” numbers of younger people coming into the profession. The survey comes against a background of fears in the whole of the UK that trading standards is not financed or staffed well enough to protect consumers from problems including illegal vapes, tobacco and other products.

John Herriman, chief executive of the Chartered Trading Standards Institute (CTSI) said: “This isn’t just a Scottish issue – it is a UK-wide challenge”.

These findings echo a Which? investigation from February 2025 that characterised a trading standards postcode lottery, with inadequate staffing levels in many areas – leaving millions of people exposed to crime, fake and dangerous products and scams.
Which? found that 17 percent of services have fewer than two staff per 100,000 people, and 57 percent have fewer than four per 100,000 people. Services with the least staff are predominantly London boroughs. Enfield had only 0.43 staff per 100,000, with Lambeth, Redbridge and Barnet also having less than one member of staff per 100,000 people.

In absolute terms, this amounts to 1.4 full time equivalent (FTE) staff in Enfield and 2 FTE in each of Lambeth and Redbridge (including their admin support). These boroughs each have more than 13,000 businesses to enforce against and populations of more than 300,000 to protect.

Once again, I am not going to replicate the entire piece – which would equally reward study – other than to highlight Pete’s words where he says that there are multiple crises unfolding in Britain, this systemwide phenomenon is probably the least reported because it is part of the invisible tier of government that nobody really appreciates until it collapses completely.

Responding to this piece, I wrote that the failure to support the regulatory system is a bit like building maintenance; you can scrimp on repairs for a long while and then, one day, that leak you’ve been ignoring turns into a flood and the roof caves in.

Right up to the point that it happens, though, things look OK. In like fashion, the government is storing up serious problems and the worst of it is that when trouble arrives, they won’t have the wherewithal to fix it.

This has a much broader political impact as well, as proper enforcement of technical law would do much to create a “hostile environment” which would deter many migrants who do not subscribe to our customs and norms.

Returning to the shortage of the planning enforcement resource in Bradford, for instance, we see Pakistani (Kashmiri) families buy up semi-detached houses where three or even four generations live in a single dwelling.

As their families grow, they extend their houses, often way in excess of permitted development rules, with neither planning permission nor Building Regulation approval. Enforcement is non-existent and, over time, the whole character of the neighbourhood is changing as the population density is massively increasing, with 10-12 or more people living in one house.

Simply having laws isn’t good enough. If they are important enough to be on the statute book, they need to be enforced – and this isn’t happening. Such is the scale of this issue, though, that I have barely scratched the surface. The lack of attention to it is a massive lacuna and one to which I must return.