“It’s been a weird year. I’ve chopped my arm off. I’ve gone back to work. I’ve carried on doing my swimming and obtained my CTSI animal health and welfare qualification.” When speaking with Kristina Hann, it soon becomes clear that she takes whatever life has to throw at her in her stride.
“That last one was a really big deal for me, as I once had a senior manager refuse to let me take it because they didn’t think I could physically do the work,” she adds.
Born with a left arm that was paralysed as a result of damage to the brachial plexus nerves, Kristina is no stranger to confronting prejudices. “The worst thing about growing up with an arm that doesn’t work but is clearly visible is people don’t believe you,” she says. “At school, I got detention in PE for not being able to tie my shoelaces because the teacher said I was faking it. Why would I lie about that? It’s one of those things that you never forget.”
Kristina Hann and her support dog Louis (pictured before Kristina’s amputation)
Kristina soon learned that her disability would influence her life in many ways – and often because of others’ thoughtlessness. “I failed my graphics GCSE exam because the pencil kept falling out of the compass, and no one would help me put it back in,” she remembers. “When I was 15, I wanted to join the Navy the following year, and no one told me that I wasn’t going to be allowed to until I went to a careers fair and was turned away.”
Kristina studied law at university, and when she graduated in 2009, a job at Hertfordshire Trading Standards caught her eye. At first though, she thought her medical history would stand in her way. As well as having a paralysed arm, she also has epilepsy and had recently had a seizure that prevented her from driving. “The job advertisement said a full driving licence was required but I was told to apply anyway and they’d review it,” she says.
“Also, because I’d be going out and about, they needed to do a review of whether or not I’d be physically able to do the job,” she says. “I’d been through this before, so I was expecting to get turned down on medical grounds – but one of the senior managers wanted to give me the chance to prove myself. I got the job, and I then got my driving licence in 2010. There were some interesting questions that were asked of me though, like ‘how do you type one-handed?’ Me being me, I said, ‘one-handed’.”
Kristina began her Trading Standards career as a Trainee Officer at Hertfordshire Council, later earning the Diploma in Consumer Affairs and Trading Standards (DCATS). “I had maternity leave in the middle of that, but I managed to qualify at the same time as everybody else I started with,” she says. “I think taking nine months out of the process made me work a little bit harder afterwards to make sure I caught up with everybody.”
Kristina stayed at Hertfordshire for 13 years, learning the ropes, earning the respect of colleagues and working her way up to Senior Trading Standards Officer level. During that time, her health complications continued. “I had operation after operation to try and fix my arm,” she says. “They were talking about taking stuff out of my legs to put into my arm, but I said, ‘absolutely not, that sounds terrifying!’
“I let them do one last surgery on me in 2019, but it did not work and made things ten times worse. So I said, ‘I want rid of my arm’.
“They amputated it a year ago. It was a choice, an elective amputation. I was only off work for two weeks – and I was off swimming for three weeks, winning my first regional gold medal in over 20 years a few months later in the 200m individual medley event. The amputation was the best decision I ever made. I don’t know how to be two-handed. I’ve just got on with it.”
Finding the rhythm
When she first started at Hertfordshire Trading Standards, Kristina was keen to put her legal training to good use. As well as criminal and contract law, she says, “I had also studied holiday law, which ended up working quite well because I already knew about the Package Travel Regulations and things like misdescriptions in brochures. It’s a bit of a niche area but, in the event of things like the Thomas Cook or Monarch Airlines collapses, or the Covid travel disruption, it’s actually quite useful.”
Speaking of travel disruption, things weren’t always plain sailing at the beginning of Kristina’s career either. “For the first year of working in Trading Standards, I have to admit, I felt completely out of my depth,” she says. “But a couple of colleagues just said to me, ‘It’s normal, trust me. After a year, you’ll be fine. It will all click.’ And they were right. Now I can’t imagine doing anything else.”
Nonetheless, in those early days, Kristina was constrained by other people’s ideas about what she was capable of. “One of the senior officers made it very clear that they did not want me involved in dealing with rogue traders,” she says. “They didn’t think it would be a good fit, and they didn’t even really give me the chance. I just accepted it because I thought they knew better.”
That all changed though when Tim Day – who is now one of CTSI’s joint Lead Officers for Doorstep Crime – joined the Hertfordshire team. “When Tim started, he had a completely different opinion,” Kristina says. “He took me under his wing along with a couple of others, and upskilled us. He didn’t believe in the whole ‘let’s keep certain jobs for ourselves’ attitude which unfortunately, some people do have.
“My last investigation at Hertfordshire was a rogue trading one in which the defendants were both found guilty, and one of them did get jail time. If you’d told me when I first started that I’d be the lead on that, I’d have laughed at the idea of me going out to rogue trading incidents and dealing with some quite confrontational people face-to-face.”
While almost everyone in Trading Standards will have dealt with a fair amount of confrontation in their interactions with rogue traders or uncooperative businesses, unfortunately Kristina has also come up against some adversarial and unpleasant behaviour in the workplace.
“Trading Standards has definitely been a mixed bag and although the vast majority of people have been lovely, it’s the few that haven’t that stick in your mind,” she admits. “I’ve had an Officer make fun of my arm, and mimic how it used to look because it was quite deformed. I had the same person tell me I’d never make it as a Trading Standards Officer – which is hilarious because I’ve reached the same level as them, so I guess I did make it.
“Some people are just bullies,” she adds matter-of-factly. “It doesn’t stop when you leave school – some adults are bullies. We all know this – we see enough people getting accused of it in Parliament or on Strictly Come Dancing.
“I wasn’t the only one that got picked on by this person, and they’re no longer there, thankfully. But it was awful.”
As if dealing with rogue traders and a bullying colleague didn’t make life difficult enough, during the Covid lockdown of 2020, Kristina’s mother died suddenly and unexpectedly, and family commitments meant she needed to move home to Colchester. “I’m the legal guardian of my severely disabled brother, and my dad suddenly got Alzheimer’s in a very aggressive form, so I’m his legal guardian as well,” she says.
When a job at Essex Trading Standards came up, Kristina made the leap, and started there in March 2022.
Dynamic duo
Following a period of momentous and stressful changes – a bereavement, new care responsibilities, a new job and a series of major health procedures – a fresh glimmer of light arrived in Kristina’s life in March 2023 in the shape of Louis.
Louis is a three-year-old black Labrador, specially trained by the charity Dogs For Good to work with an adult with a physical disability. “Part of my condition means I drop things on the floor all the time,” Kristina explains. “He’ll pick up my keys when I drop them, my purse, the remote control. He takes off my slippers, my socks, my shoes.
“Around the house, we put ropes on doors that he can use to open them. He is able to push the metal buttons that open doors in public places. If I’ve got something in my hand, I’ll just say to him the code word to open the door and he’ll stick his face in it. He’s not the most graceful with that – he will literally headbutt the thing – but he is getting a little bit more graceful as he’s getting older. He’s just absolutely brilliant at doing what he does,” she adds with a touch of unmistakable pride. Although, she points out, “He doesn’t work for free – every time he does something he’s supposed to do, he gets treats.”
While I’m speaking to Kristina over Teams, she turns her laptop around and Louis’s nose, muzzle and huge brown eyes fill the screen. It’s not unusual for people’s pets to make guest appearances on video calls, but it’s not so often that those animals double up as colleagues – and Louis has become a popular member of the Essex Trading Standards team. “I think Louis is a more valued member of staff than I am sometimes,” Kristina smiles. As well as being made an honorary CTSI branch member, he accompanies Kristina to training boot camps. “He sat there for all the sessions but I don’t know what he’s taken away from it. He slept mostly.”
Another important person in Kristina’s life and career is her partner, Mark Winter, who made the move from Hertfordshire along with her and is now a Trading Standards Officer at Essex. His other job title, she says with a grin, is “Assistance Dog’s Assistant”.
A different perspective
Trading Standards is a varied career which requires its practitioners to interact with people with a diverse range of experiences. So, I ask Kristina, does she think her disability has made her more likely to appreciate the challenges that others might face? “I think it depends on the complaint in question,” she says. “We’ve had a lot of complaints that can be disability-related, like with the motability aid sector. I’ve been able to do work on that with a different understanding perhaps to other Officers, because I know how important motability aids are to day-to-day life. If you buy something like that from a trader and it doesn’t work, it’s not a case of, ‘Oh, that’s annoying’. It can affect whether or not you’re able to do your day-to-day living.
“Going back to holiday law, there are also things like holidaying as a disabled person; whether you can use your blue badge abroad for example, and what you’re entitled to as a disabled passenger, or hotels being misleading on their accessibility.
“Having a disability does mean that I see things differently sometimes; I might overhear conversations that people have and think, wait a minute, you’re not thinking about any kind of equality or diversity issues; we can sometimes forget that there are other people out there who have a very different kind of life.
“It also means that when we intervene in vulnerability situations, I know what it is like to be deemed vulnerable and treated differently because of it. I don’t think I’m vulnerable in the slightest, but I also know that I can be sometimes – but then I also know that every single person can be. We all have the ability to become vulnerable at some point in life, and that’s how people get scammed or become victims of rogue traders.”
After fifteen years in Trading Standards, it’s fair to say that Kristina has seen the best and the worst that the profession has to offer. She has had some remarkable and supportive colleagues, she says. Alongside her partner and colleague Mark Winter, she singles out for particular praise Tim Day and previous line manager Chris Davies at Hertfordshire, her current line manager Alan Richards, Trading Standards Manager Matthew Sanctuary and the Head of Wellbeing and Public Health, Clinical, Lifestyles and Trading Standards at Essex Council, Chris French. On her current team, “Essex Trading Standards has been fantastic,” Kristina says. “My management, my team – every single time, they’ve been so accommodating to Louis.”
But her experiences of bullying and discrimination are something she looks back on with a sense of frustration. “I should have dealt with it differently,” she says. “I initially ignored it, but then they started picking on somebody else.
“That’s what set me off; I can cope with it myself, but I’m not having it happen to somebody else. When I first spoke to a manager about it, I made the mistake of accepting the defence, ‘Oh well, that’s just what they’re like. They don’t really mean it.’ But there’s office banter and then there’s bullying. I was not finding that funny at all.
“Eventually, I went to CTSI and things got dealt with. My advice is don’t ignore it, because ignoring it does nothing. Go to your line manager, and if you’re not happy with their response, you can report these things to CTSI confidentially through their EDI rep.”
Sense of the possible
For people with disabilities, Kristina believes, Trading Standards can be a rewarding career, as long as everybody is upfront about the practicalities involved. “It’s a job that, if given the right adjustments, anybody can do,” she says. “I mean, I’ve got an entire limb missing.”
While there may be accessibility issues with site visits for wheelchair users, Kristina says, “We have to do research on where we’re going anyway, so it would just be an extra part of a risk assessment. And there is plenty of work that is available that wouldn’t necessarily mean they’d have to go out to these places anyway.
“I’ve met a lot of disabled people who are not upfront about their disability in job interviews, because they’re scared they’re not going to get hired. That’s not been my experience in Trading Standards at Hertfordshire or Essex whatsoever. I’ve been upfront. In those interviews I’ve had, I could’ve hidden my disability easily both times. I’ve never done that.
“You have to be open about what your restrictions are though. The Equality Act does state that reasonable adjustments can be made, as long as they are in keeping with health and safety, which for the most part they are. It’s about having open dialogues with the people who are going to be your managers, and knowing what the job entails.”
When she first went for her job interview at Essex Trading Standards, Kristina laughs, “I can’t imagine what they thought when I said, ‘By the way, I’m having my arm chopped off at some point in the very near future’.”
Conversations like that certainly make life more interesting, and it is clear that Kristina brings a keen sense of humour to the workplace. As the interview is wrapping up, she suddenly says, “I’ve got funny stories as well. There was the time I got my arm stuck in a vending machine, and one of my managers had to open the freaking door to get me out. My friends never let me live that down….”
