It is a registered collective trademark owned by the Made in Great Britain Campaign Ltd, which allows its members to use the trademark to identify their products of British origin. This means that using the official ‘Made in Britain’ trademark label is exclusive and requires a licence, which is acquired through membership of the organisation. Others may not use this protected label for their products.

‘Made in Britain’ reflects the product quality of British provenance. In addition to the licencing requirement, using this trademark is also subject to the common rules for country-of-origin labelling, which are less precise but can be summarised as follows. Labelling a product with ‘Made in Britain’ has to meet the expectation that the economic origin of the product is Great Britain, at least to a sufficient extent, so that customers are not misled. This is imposed in the UK by the Trade Descriptions Act 1968 and similarly regulated overseas. There are further broad provisions in international agreements, the EU, however, has not yet harmonised rules for trading across borders (apart from food labelling).