The Product Regulation and Metrology Act 2025 received Royal Assent in July, giving the government sweeping new powers to regulate product safety, performance, and measurement accuracy across the UK market. For garden centres and pool and spa retailers, this is more significant than it might first appear.
If you sell pool chemicals, these are regulated as biocidal products under the GB Biocidal Products Regulation. Only authorised products can be marketed and sold, with specific labelling, packaging, and safe handling requirements. Pesticides, plant treatments, and certain garden chemicals may also fall under biocidal or plant protection regulations.
If you sell electrical items, children’s products, or toys, you have obligations under the General Product Safety Regulations. An OPSS report from July 2025 found that smaller businesses showed the least awareness of their product safety responsibilities, with sole traders demonstrating the lowest level of knowledge.
The practical implication: your POS system should be tracking product categories, supplier information, and where possible, batch or lot data. If a recall hits your supply chain, you need to identify affected stock within hours, not days. That’s not a nice-to-have — it’s becoming a legal requirement as the secondary legislation under the new Act takes shape.
At ITS4, we configure POS systems for this kind of product traceability. NCR Counterpoint is particularly well-suited to it, with robust category management, supplier tracking, and reporting capabilities that most smaller POS platforms simply don’t offer.