Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, what steps his Department is taking to ensure that consumers are provided with sufficient information on product labels to identify real animal fur in products sold in the UK.

The Department ensures that there are robust protections in place for consumers. The Consumer Protection from Unfair Trading Regulations 2008 (CPRs) requires information given to consumers to be accurate and not misleading. The Regulations prohibit commercial practices, such as labelling, which contain false or misleading information, or which omits material information that a consumers needs to make an informed decision.

In addition the EU regulation on the labelling and marking of textile products (EU Regulation 1007/2011) requires that the presence of non-textile parts of animal origin in textile products, such as leather, beads, pearls and fur, must be clearly labelled in such a way that is not misleading and that the consumer can understand. The labelling of products containing such materials – even in small quantities – must be labelled or marked with the phrase “Contains non-textile parts of animal origin” whenever they are made available on the market.