For a garment to be described as ‘made in Britain’, at least 50 per cent of its value should have been added in the UK. It is vital that the Government protects Brand Britain by enforcing the country of origin rule in the clothes we sell. The UK fashion industry is worth £26 billion a year to the economy, but only three per cent of the clothes we wear are made here. Now that Brexit has freed us to set our own laws, why can’t we have a Britishness legislation like the Swiss – our very own ‘Toblerone Mark’?
They are hoodwinking the customer into believing it is a British garment. Of course, that is not made obvious when you are buying the garment. But look inside the clothes they sell and on the label it says: ‘Made in Vietnam’. They can print Union Flags and historic British landmarks all over their marketing brochures. Yet – without naming and shaming my rivals – this is precisely what some of our supposedly ‘British’ clothing brands are doing. If my firm shipped our clothes to be made in the Far East, sewed on the buttons in the UK and then passed them off as ‘Made in Britain’, customers would cry foul – and rightly so. Last week, for example, the food industry’s fraud squad said it was investigating a major supermarket chain for selling products labelled ‘best British beef’ when the meat had been imported from thousands of miles away.
One found that at least half the meat in Wall’s ‘Lincolnshire’ sausages came from intensive pig farms in Denmark, Germany and Holland.īut the mis-selling continues even today, potentially leading to British farmers losing out, rip-offs, health risks and customers misled about the origin of their purchases. Investigations showed how some of Britain’s best-known food-makers had taken advantage of a labelling loophole in the 1968 Trades Description Act. ‘British made’ labels on popular meat products and pies were banned in 2012, amid confusion over what it really meant. Over here, sadly, there is no such clarity.
That’s why Toblerone packaging must now read ‘established in Switzerland’, rather than ‘of Switzerland’. It was a breach of the Swissness Act 2017, which means products can only claim they are ‘Swiss-made’ if at least 80 per cent of their raw materials – or 100 per cent in the case of milk and dairy products – come from Switzerland.
Toblerone can no longer carry images of the Matterhorn and the Swiss flag as production has been moved to Slovakia Last week, Switzerland’s most iconic chocolate brand, Toblerone, announced it can no longer carry images of the Matterhorn and the Swiss flag on its packaging because it has removed some of its production to Slovakia. Shamefully, there is no law to protect the ‘Britishness’ of the products we produce.īut other countries are already doing this successfully. This loyalty to local skills and suppliers has underpinned my firm’s success for six decades and, I believe, is the secret to British manufacturing. Later this month, they will be photographed wearing our autumn collection in the sweeping grounds of Stapleford Park, a historic country house hotel in Leicestershire. The cotton had been printed and dyed at our factory in Alfreton, before skilled pattern-cutters and seamstresses shaped the finished product with pride, using skills handed down through generations.Įven our fashion models fly the flag for Brand Britain. Inspecting a cotton dress made at my company’s factory in Derbyshire, I drew a breath of quiet satisfaction at a quality British garment.
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