DPP: UK Opens Consultation on Digital Product Records
The UK has opened a call for evidence on digital product records, open until 21 September 2026. Here's what it means for manufacturers tracking the EU DPP timeline.
Jacqui de Young
The UK Is Weighing Its Own Digital Product Record. Here's What Manufacturers Should Know.
The Department for Business, Innovation, Science and Trade has opened a call for evidence on Digital Product Records (DPRs), giving businesses until 11:59pm on 21 September 2026 to respond. It's the next phase of the same Digital Product Passport conversation manufacturers have been tracking for the EU, this time asking what a UK equivalent should look like.
Why now
The EU's Digital Product Passport was introduced under the Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), which entered into force in the EU and Northern Ireland in July 2024.
The first mandatory requirements land for batteries and construction products in 2027, applying directly in Northern Ireland under the Windsor Framework regardless of what Great Britain decides.
The UK government hasn't yet set its own position, and this call for evidence is the first formal step toward one. The government is also running product-specific consultations on batteries, construction products, toys, and low carbon industrial products in parallel, with responses to those considered alongside each other as this broader question takes shape.
What the consultation is actually asking
The call for evidence is not about specific sector requirements. It's about whether DPR architecture makes sense at all for Great Britain, and if so, what it should look like.
The questions cover:
How prepared businesses already feel for DPR-style requirements, and where their awareness has come from
The benefits and drawbacks businesses expect, from reduced admin and faster recalls to integration costs and data sensitivity risks
What would happen if Great Britain, Northern Ireland, and the EU ended up with different rules
Which types of product information businesses see as most valuable in a digital record
Whether a future UK system should be interoperable with the EU's, or tailored specifically to the GB market
Expected one-off and ongoing compliance costs, and how much of that is likely to be labelling-related
Responses can be submitted online or by email, and the government has said it will use AI tools to help analyse submissions, with an anonymised summary published afterward.
What this means for manufacturers
Question 10 is the one worth reading twice: it asks businesses to state a preference between a GB system built for interoperability with the EU, via a shared data carrier, or one tailored specifically to Great Britain with its own labelling requirements.
That answer will shape whether manufacturers end up maintaining one compliance system or two. Businesses already selling into the EU or Northern Ireland have a direct interest in making the interoperability case now, while the policy is still open, rather than adapting to it after the fact.
Where TAZAAR fits
Regardless of which direction a UK DPR policy takes, the underlying discipline required to comply with it, item-level identification, persistent lifecycle data, and structured records that travel with a product, is the same discipline AssetID is already built around for the EU DPP.
Businesses building that foundation now won't be starting over if Great Britain lands on its own system.