Yes. Unfortunately. Even my trading standards won’t take them on. Supermarkets have clever, expensive KCs.
A few years ago I asked the Irish authorities about the use of either creamed or soft-set. It took a while of bouncing between the food standards & agriculture people, but the eventual response was that soft-set was a descriptive term and was fine to use, but that creamed might indicate addition of dairy and could be misleading so wasn't OK. I imagine the UK viewpoint would be similar.
The problem is that much of the honey sold in supermarkets really is pure honey. There's a lot of the Chinese sugar water too, but the stuff from Central & Eastern Europe tends to be quite good quality. So you can't say it's not pure unless you actually have run lab tests.
That word is acceptable (and any other you care to use) so long your label includes the word Honey as required by the Honey Regs. Only word TS don't like is raw, and will issue compliance notices to remove all reference (erratically, and usually after a public complaint).
Not usually a public complaint .. it would appear that complaints about the word raw usually come from other beekeepers ... and even then, TS are often resistant to act.
How do we know? I thought it was customers with a taste for pedantry.
Agree, and when that stage is reached, most will ignore the law. Oxalic acid is a parallel situation: will the VMD ever stump up the cash to prosecute those who use cheap illegal OA, and not the pricier legal muck ApiBioxal?
