Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, if she will take steps to simplify the (a) commodity code system, (b) requirements to weigh items and (c) other administrative requirements for businesses operating cross-border trade.

The UK's commodity code nomenclature forms the core structure for delivering the UK's international trade policy. Derived from the World Custom’s Organization’s Harmonized System, for which HMRC represents and promotes UK interests, the commodity codes used in the UK provide critical granularity to enable the delivery of key UK policy required to support UK growth. As such, there are no plans to fundamentally change or reduce the UK commodity code structure; the current system is designed to both facilitate cross border trade and help maintain the UK’s compliance programme to protect UK businesses. HMRC offers guidance and a significant support service to help people in determining the correct commodity code for their goods.

The weighing of goods for customs duty and declarations is required to operate an effective tariff system and is in line with recognised international trade practices. We are therefore unlikely to make any significant changes to weight requirements for the types of goods covered.

The government is committed to facilitating legitimate UK trade and HMRC has set out a package of measures to simplify customs import and export processes for traders, while upholding the UK’s high regulatory and security standards at the border. Details of this can be found at https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/customs-simplification-measures-december-2023/summary-of-customs-simplification-measures-december-2023.

Whilst working within a global customs framework, HMRC’s strategic aim of ‘making it easy to get tax right and hard to bend or break the rules’ ensures that HMRC has an ongoing interest in balancing the need for facilitations, to reduce administrative burdens, and the right compliance activities to support and protect UK businesses.