Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, with reference to the answer of 29 April 2026 to question 129483, what (a) the declared trade value of goods imported under BIRDs declarations across all procedure codes and both CDS and CHIEF, (b) HMRC's estimate of the VAT that should have been collected on those sales and (c) the VAT remitted to HMRC by sellers and online marketplaces for those imports was in each year between 2022 and 2025.

(a) The trade value and number of declarations from the Bulk Import Reduced Data Set (BIRDS) under the Customs Declaration Service and Low-Value Bulking of Imports (LVBI) under the legacy CHIEF system are in the following table:

Data notes:

1. Low value imports are defined as being exempt from customs duties if valued at £135 or less. These imports either use the Bulk Import Reduced Data Set (BIRDS) under CDS and Low-Value Bulking of Imports (LVBI) under CHIEF facilitations.
2. The use of the BIRDS facilitation has been identified as declarations using CDS procedure codes beginning “0020''. The use of the LVBI facilitation has been identified as declarations using CHIEF procedure codes “4000003”, “4900003”, or “4000005”. LVBI was phased out with the introduction of BIRDS alongside the decommissioning of CHIEF replaced by CDS.
3. Declarations with ‘GB’ denoted as the country of dispatch have been excluded from analysis.
4. BIRDS declarations where the total declared value of all the consignments covered is above £10,000,000 have been removed from this analysis as these are assumed to be erroneous.
5. Counts of declarations have been rounded to the nearest 1000. Totals may not sum together due to rounding.
6. The methodology for calculating the number of BIRDS declarations has been improved and now excludes a small number of declarations where relevant information is recorded at an aggregate level.

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(b) and (c) HMRC does not have an estimate or hold specific data on the total VAT chargeable or remitted in respect of imported goods declared under BIRDS. Different rates of VAT may apply to items declared under BIRDS, with some benefiting from relief from VAT. This information is not recorded within BIRDS declaration data.

HMRC does not hold information on VAT revenue from specific goods or services, including goods imported through BIRDS. This is because businesses are not required to provide figures at a transaction level on their VAT returns, as this would impose an excessive administrative burden.