Client
A regional partnership of local authority Trading Standards teams sharing enforcement resources across several neighbouring council areas
Sector
Local Government & Trading Standards
Engagement
Cross-authority intelligence sharing platform matching complaint, business and enforcement records across council case management systems - multi-quarter programme.
What the client needed
Rogue traders - unlicensed builders, doorstep scammers, traders selling counterfeit or unsafe goods - don't stop at a council boundary, but the client's member authorities each ran their own separate case management system with no shared view between them. A trader who'd changed their business name after a complaint in one authority could cross into a neighbouring one and start again with no local record to flag them, sometimes for weeks or months before an officer in the second authority happened to recognise a pattern from an informal phone call or a regional meeting. The partnership's own review had found cases where the same individual, trading under three or four different names and vehicle registrations, had been the subject of active investigations in two authorities simultaneously without either team knowing the other existed - and where the residents targeted were disproportionately elderly or otherwise vulnerable, exactly the group doorstep crime is built to target.
How we worked
- Built a shared intelligence layer that ingested complaint and investigation records from each member authority's own case management system without requiring any of them to replace it.
- Developed entity-matching logic to link records referring to the same trader under different business names, addresses, phone numbers or vehicle registrations - the core problem, since rogue traders routinely rebrand to stay ahead of enforcement.
- Added an automatic cross-authority alert so that a new complaint matching a trader already flagged elsewhere in the partnership reached the investigating officer the same day, rather than depending on informal contact between teams.
- Built a regional intelligence dashboard for partnership leads, showing traders active across multiple authorities and the current status of enforcement action against them in each.
- Worked with each authority's legal and data protection teams to agree a formal data-sharing framework covering what could flow automatically and what still required an officer's judgement before release, given the mix of ongoing investigations and vulnerable-victim data involved.
- Ran officer training and a phased rollout authority by authority, so each team could validate matches against cases they already knew before trusting the system with ones they didn't.
Measured results
All figures verified with the client. Specific trader, officer and case detail withheld in line with our standard confidentiality terms and ongoing-investigation handling requirements.
- The time from a new complaint to a cross-authority match being flagged to the relevant officer fell from weeks - or, in cases that were never connected at all, never - to same-day in the large majority of matched cases.
- The entity-matching layer identified several traders already under investigation in more than one member authority simultaneously, cases that would previously have run in parallel without either team aware of the other.
- Officers report significantly more confidence raising a new case, since they can now check in minutes whether a trader has a history elsewhere in the partnership rather than relying on personal contacts in neighbouring teams.
- The regional dashboard has become the partnership's main tool for deciding where to direct joint enforcement action, replacing an ad hoc process based on whichever authority happened to have capacity.
- The partnership is now assessing whether to extend the same matching approach to a wider group of authorities beyond the original member councils.
"We'd known for years that the traders causing us the most harm were the ones who moved as soon as we got close - a different business name, a different van, the same person. Knowing that and being able to prove it in time to act on it were two different things. This platform closed that gap, and it did it without asking any of our teams to give up the case system they already knew how to use."
Working on something similar?
If this engagement looks like the kind of problem you are facing, we would be glad to compare notes by email.
Context and constraints
Each member authority's Trading Standards team operated under its own council's IT governance, its own case management system, and its own data protection registration - none of which had been designed with cross-authority sharing in mind, because none of the underlying legislation requires it as a default. The brief was explicit that the platform had to work as an intelligence layer sitting above each authority's existing system, matching and surfacing records rather than becoming a new system of record any single council would need to migrate into. That constraint mattered as much for adoption as for governance: a platform that asked seven different councils to change how their officers logged a routine complaint would have taken years to roll out even before any matching logic existed.
The vulnerable-victim dimension shaped the data-sharing framework as much as the investigation data itself. Many of the residents targeted by the traders this platform was built to catch were elderly, isolated, or otherwise vulnerable, and the framework had to allow enough detail to flow between authorities for an officer to act quickly while keeping victim-identifying information within tighter limits than trader-identifying information - two different sensitivity levels within the same case record, agreed authority by authority before a single record moved between systems.
Why entity matching, not just a shared database, was the hard part
A shared view of complaint records is only useful if it actually connects the records that describe the same trader, and rogue traders are, by the nature of the harm, actively working to avoid exactly that connection - a new business name, a different phone number, a van with new signage, sometimes within weeks of a complaint being logged. Building matching logic that could link records across these deliberate changes, without also generating false matches that would waste officer time chasing traders who were genuinely unconnected, took considerably longer than the data integration itself. We tuned the matching approach iteratively against the partnership's own historical cases, where officers already knew which records should and shouldn't link, before trusting it on live data.
Designing for evidential quality, not just speed
A faster flag is only useful to a Trading Standards team if the underlying match can also stand up as evidence, since these cases frequently end in prosecution rather than a warning letter. The platform was built to preserve a clear record of why any two entries had been matched - which fields, at what confidence - so an officer building a case file could show their working rather than presenting a system-generated link as unexplained fact. That design choice paid off directly during the phased rollout, when officers used the match explanations to catch a small number of coincidental matches the matching logic had over-confidently linked, refining the approach before it went live across the full partnership.
Lessons learned
The first lesson was that a cross-authority platform lives or dies on the data-sharing framework as much as on the technology - agreeing what could move automatically between seven different councils' legal and data protection teams was its own workstream, and needed to start on day one rather than being bolted on once a technical design was already fixed.
The second lesson was that entity matching for adversarial data - records describing someone actively trying not to be connected to their own history - is a fundamentally harder problem than matching records that simply happen to be duplicated or inconsistent, and it deserved more of the build's time than we initially scoped for it.
The third lesson was that officers trusted the system fastest when they could see why it had made a match, not just that it had - the evidential transparency we built for prosecution purposes turned out to be just as important for day-to-day officer confidence.
If your organisation is weighing how to share intelligence across separate teams or authorities that were never designed to see each other's data, we would be glad to discuss what a programme like this might look like for you. Email sales@halfteck.com.