Europe and UK tighten controls on Shein and ultra-fast fashion imports

The UK government moved to accelerate the end of its £135 customs duty relief for low-value imports, a change that will raise the cost of the ultra-fast fashion parcel stream Shein and rivals have used to flood Britain. The announcement on 23 June also opened a review into whether online sellers are paying VAT correctly, with any new revenue set to help fund the high street business rates system.

That British move did not come out of nowhere. A consultation on reforming the customs treatment of low-value imports ran from 26 November 2025 to 6 March 2026, after the Chancellor launched a comprehensive review in April 2025 in response to complaints from high street retailers that online rivals were being given an unfair edge. The language from London was blunt: the goal was to support fair competition between stores on the street and sellers moving everything through a checkout screen.

Brussels has been tightening the screws at the same time. The European Commission says its 2026 customs reform is the most ambitious overhaul of EU customs rules since 1968, with e-commerce now treated as a core enforcement problem rather than a side issue. EU finance ministers agreed on 13 November 2025 to remove the €150 customs duty relief threshold for low-value parcels, and the Commission later set out a temporary €3 customs duty per item on consignments up to €150 imported from outside the EU, effective from 1 July 2026 and scheduled to run until 1 July 2028.

That temporary fee matters because it hits the exact model that powers ultra-fast fashion: small parcels, low declared values and huge volumes. The Commission has also said it wants stronger data-sharing and risk assessment, and it has floated a non-discriminatory handling fee to cover the compliance burden of supervising billions of e-commerce parcels. In other words, the bill for managing the flood of packages is no longer being quietly absorbed by the system.

Ecotextile News has singled out Shein and Temu as major beneficiaries of the old low-value-parcel regime, and the new rules shift that advantage. The practical effect is not just higher landed costs. It is more customs exposure, more scrutiny around VAT, and more pressure to build the kind of compliance machinery ultra-fast fashion has never needed to prize. As Europe and the UK close the loopholes, the economics of speed are getting harder to hide.