Fireworks on St Ann’s Road update
Further to yesterday’s news about the fireworks shack plonked on the road by St Mary’s Park, I have heard back from Trading Standards, and the news is not good.Their role is only to make sure the fireworks are made to the required standard (which apparently they are in this case) and that they are not sold to under 18s.
A Trading Standards officer is taking an under 18 down this afternoon for a test purchase, but obviously this has to wait until after school.
So our local portakabin seller has the necessary licence to store the fireworks from the Fire Service, and assuming he doesn’t sell them to a child he can’t be closed down by Trading Standards. There is one other way he can be stopped, which is if he is found to have illegally blocked the Highway. The Council’s Highways team are going down later to have a look.
I am intrigued as to how this guy managed to get a fire service licence and will try to find out. But in the meantime it looks unlikely that Trading Standards can do anything. It seems shocking that with all the publicity from the Council and the Police, and all the good will of most local people to try and make Bonfire Night safe, any old chancer can set up shop on a public highway and start flogging gunpoweder-filled God knows what to all and sundry.
According to Trading Standards, if I were to acquire the same storage licence this fella appears to have, I could flog the fireworks from my front room and there’d be nothing that they could do to stop me. Which is bizarre.
It looks unlikely that we can do anything to stop this guy this year (by the time the bureaucratic wheels of action have creaked into motion he’ll be long gone), but we need to make sure that he isn’t back next year. I am going to see if I can raise this issue at the next Prestwich Local Area Partnership.
Either that or go into the quasi-legal firework-selling industry of course…
Rick
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