Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask Mr Chancellor of the Exchequer, with reference to paragraph 8.44 of the White Paper, entitled The United Kingdom's exit from and new partnership with the European Union, Cm9417, published in February 2017, what the average time taken was for customs declarations submitted (a) electronically and (b) non-electronically in the UK to be cleared in each of the last three years.

The average time taken to process electronic customs declarations is defined in the contract with the service supplier. This states that 95% should be processed in 5 seconds and 99.9% in 20 seconds. These targets have been achieved for each of the last three years.

Non-electronic customs declarations are input by HM Revenue and Customs to the electronic system. Once these customs declarations are on the electronic system, the above clearance times are achieved.