Yes. Nothing in UK law restricts the use of a VPN, and they are standard equipment in British workplaces. What makes the UK unusual is not what it forbids but how much it records and checks.

Two pieces of law shape the everyday experience here:
  • The Investigatory Powers Act 2016 requires internet providers to retain a record of the services their customers connect to for twelve months, available to a long list of public bodies on request. It is the reason the law is known informally as the Snoopers' Charter.
  • The Online Safety Act 2023 brought in age checks, which took effect on 25 July 2025 under Ofcom's rules. In practice that often means uploading a passport or submitting to a face scan through a third-party checking service, and a great many adults would rather not hand that to a company they have never heard of.
Alongside those, British courts regularly order internet providers to block piracy sites at the request of rights holders, which is why the same address can load on one network and fail on another.

What a VPN does here is narrow and specific. Your provider records an encrypted connection to one server instead of a list of everywhere you went, and sites see the country you connected from. It does not make anything legal that was not legal before, and it does not stand in for a TV Licence, which the law requires for watching live television or using BBC iPlayer at all.

If you want to see what a site currently knows about you, check your IP address before and after connecting.