[GPI]

Garden centre claims entrapment after 16-year-old buys blade

A GARDEN centre boss has accused trading standards of entrapment after it sent a child test purchaser into his shop.

Brent and Harrow Trading Standards regularly try to catch businesses selling products to people too young to buy them and one child picked up a pruning saw at Shoots Garden Centre, in Common Road, Stanmore.

Piers Mummery, the shop’s managing director, said the shop assistant who sold the blade was a 16-year-old, just a few weeks into his first job.

He said: “It incensed me because I felt totally stitched-up. He was only 16. This poor kid was almost in tears. I think entrapment is the wrong approach.”

The shop stocks around 40 items which he believes could be used as weapons, including garden forks.

But Mr Mummery claims he has had no advice from trading standards about which ones staff are allowed to sell to children and which they are not.

He said: “If someone wants to go and stab someone they're not going to get into a car and go to the garden centre and buy a pruning saw.

Read more here....... http://www.harrowtimes.co.uk/news/3802124.Trading_Standards_slammed_over_test_purchaser/