In my experience, Trading standards are an ineficcient, lazy and incompetent quango.
Or perhaps like many public services staffed by horrendously overworked people who have recently suffered huge cuts in resources. I can't find much online for Bedford trading standards, but other councils seem to have cut trading standards by up to 80%.
What you do in such circumstances is to move away from prosecuting fraud and concentrating on safety issues (e.g. dangerous electrical goods) or rogue traders preying on the elderly.
Either way, it's disconcerting to live in a country where traders seem able to get away with these tactics for so long.