Here at Buy Britain, we are focused on supporting British-made products, local skills and jobs.
We’re not saying that you should only buy British-made, but there are compelling reasons to shop local. We’ll cover those in future posts.
For now, we want to explain more about what we mean when we say “British-made”:
What is/is not British-made?
It’s worth saying up front that there’s no 100% watertight definition. For some products it’s clear cut, for others it’s less so.
For BuyBritain.com – to qualify as British-made, products must either…
- Be wholly produced, manufactured, or assembled within the UK, or
- Have been significantly changed through a treatment or process within the UK
…and, the Seller must be based in and selling from the UK
(UK here means England, Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland )
So, it’s OK if some of the components/raw materials in a product are sourced from overseas, as long as the end product is clearly a result of significant assembly and modification of those parts/materials. And this is where some subjectivity creeps in, because it’s not always clear what “significant” is.
In such cases, we tend to apply the test – is the whole greater than the sum of the parts? Or to put it another way: has most of the product value been added here in the UK?
Some examples where we would say “Yes” are:
- Oak furniture that has been handcrafted in the UK using raw imported wood
- Jewellery wholly assembled in the UK, using some imported components (but not all)
- Chocolate where raw imported chocolate has been transformed into the finished product here in the UK
Some examples of products that would not qualify:
- Designed in the UK – but made elsewhere
- Manufactured by a UK company – but not in the UK
- T-shirts made outside the UK with designs printed on to them in the UK