HMRC Estate Transformation

Marcus Fysh Excerpts

Tuesday 29th January 2019 Commons Chamber

[Mel Stride]

The hon. Lady raises the issue of the tax office in her particular area of Wolverhampton. I am very happy at any point—this is of course an invitation to any Member—to speak to her specifically about the circumstances of the HMRC office in her location. Equally, Birmingham is not a huge distance from Wolverhampton for many of those people to commute to, but if the hon. Lady would like to take up any aspects of that with me, I will be delighted to speak to her.

[Mr Marcus Fysh (Yeovil) (Con)]

I welcome HMRC’s work on the transformation of its estate and on gearing up for customs readiness for any eventuality. In particular, it is great news that the CHIEF—customs handling of import and export freight—system will be fully ready on 30 March to handle declarations for customs and that simplifications of customs procedure are being made available to business. That will enable imports of goods into the UK to flow without hold-ups using inland clearance techniques. Will my right hon. Friend confirm that we will indeed be ready and that fear is unjustified? Will he say what he is doing to ensure that a campaign is now activated to inform small and medium-sized enterprises about what they have to do to make use of the simplifications?

[Mel Stride]

On the IT systems element of my hon. Friend’s question, he is absolutely right. CHIEF has been upgraded, and it is now capable of processing about 90 messages per second, which will be enough to handle the import and export declarations that may be required.

On the issue of informing the marketplace or traders about the new circumstances that may pertain after 29 March, we have written to 145,000 exporters that export only to the European Union and are not therefore familiar with customs arrangements. We have issued three iterations of our partnership pack and there is a huge amount of information on gov.uk, where businesses can also sign up to email alerts to make sure that they are aware of the very latest relevant information.