Find your product safety duties in the supply chain

The General Product Safety Regulations 2005 (GPSR) do not put one blanket duty on everyone who handles a consumer product. They set duties for two roles, producer and distributor, and the law decides which you are from what you do with the product.

Find your role

You are a producer of a product if you are any of these:

• the manufacturer, when you are established in the UK
• someone who presents themselves as the manufacturer by putting your name, trade mark or other distinctive mark on the product, even if someone else made it
• someone who reconditions the product
• the UK representative of a manufacturer established outside the UK
• the UK-established business that places on the market a product from outside the UK, when the manufacturer has no UK representative
• another professional in the supply chain whose activities may affect the product's safety properties

You are a distributor if you are a professional in the supply chain whose activities do not affect the product's safety properties. Retailers and wholesalers are usually distributors. One business can be a producer for some products and a distributor for others.

If you are a producer

You must not place a product on the market, offer it or supply it unless it is safe.

If you are a distributor

You must act with due care to help make sure only compliant products are supplied.

When product-specific rules apply

The GPSR apply only to the extent that no specific rule covers the same risk. For products with their own regulations, such as toys, electrical equipment or cosmetics, those regulations set the detailed duties, and the GPSR then cover only what those rules leave out. The Electrical Equipment (Safety) Regulations 2016 show how those duties are usually divided.

Online marketplaces and overseas manufacturers

The Product Regulation and Metrology Act 2025 lets the Secretary of State make regulations that put product requirements on anyone who controls access to or the contents of an online marketplace. Until regulations are made under it, those roles have no new legal duties from the Act.

If a product harms someone

Separately from the GPSR, the Consumer Protection Act 1987 makes the producer, anyone who puts their name or trade mark on the product, and the first importer into the UK liable for damage caused by a defect, whether or not they were at fault. A supplier further down the chain becomes liable if, within a reasonable time of being asked, it cannot identify who supplied the product or who the producer, brand owner or importer is. Keep records of who supplied you and whom you supplied.