The deadlines, in one place #
| How the goods leave | Declaration due |
|---|---|
| Road or inland waters | At least one hour before departure |
| Air | At least 30 minutes before departure from a UK airport |
| Sea, cargo not in a container | At least 2 hours before the goods leave the port |
| Sea, containerised, to Greenland, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, or ports on the Baltic, North, Black or Mediterranean seas | At least 2 hours before leaving port |
| Sea, all other containerised cargo | At least 24 hours before the cargo is loaded onto the vessel leaving the UK |
| Rail, where the journey from the last station at which the train was formed to the customs office of exit takes less than 2 hours | At least one hour before arriving at the office of exit |
| Rail, in other cases | At least 2 hours before the goods leave the UK |
Read down that column and the logic becomes clear. Each deadline attaches to the point after which the goods can no longer be inspected or stopped, which for a container is loading rather than sailing, and for a lorry is the moment it leaves. That is also why the road deadline looks generous and is not: one hour before departure means one hour before a vehicle that is already loaded and already late.
What has to exist before any of that #
An export movement is a stack of prerequisites, and each one has its own owner.
-
An EORI number
GOV.UK states you need one starting GB to export from England, Wales or Scotland, and one starting XI to move goods to or from Northern Ireland.
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A commodity code
For the goods, which determines duty, licensing and controls.
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Any licence the goods require
A property of the product and the destination rather than of the shipment.
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A goods movement reference
At locations using the Goods Vehicle Movement Service. GOV.UK describes it as carrying a reference for all goods contained in a vehicle, trailer or container, and multiple declarations can be uploaded to one reference.
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The driver's pack
GOV.UK lists the road consignment note, export licences, a movement reference number and any ATA or TIR carnet among the documents an HGV driver must carry on an international journey, alongside their licence, Driver CPC card, passport and tachograph records.
The Driver CPC card in that list is not incidental. It is the same card whose renewal cycle is tracked on Driver CPC records, and a lapse in it stops an export movement as effectively as a missing declaration.
The part that repeats, and the part that does not #
Export work has an unusual profile. The intellectual content is concentrated almost entirely in classification: getting the commodity code right, knowing whether a licence applies, understanding what a customs procedure code commits you to. That work is genuinely expert, it is occasionally contested, and getting it wrong is expensive.
Everything around it is repetition. The same consignor and consignee details that were captured when the load was booked reappear in the declaration, in the movement reference and on the consignment note. We set out that list, which for international road movements is published in the CMR Convention, on booking in loads. A regular customer shipping the same product to the same destination every week is producing a document that differs from last week's in a handful of fields.
Then there is the archive.
4 years
Records kept for all traded goods declared to HMRC
GOV.UK, Archiving your trade documents
10 years
How far back records may be used as evidence in a criminal investigation
GOV.UK, Archiving your trade documents
VAT records run on a separate 6 year clock. So each shipment leaves behind a file that has to be retrievable for years by a business that will have changed systems at least once in the meantime.
Which parts of export paperwork run on rules #
Runs on rules
- Working out the declaration deadline for a given movement, which is mode plus departure time
- Flagging a movement whose deadline is inside the next few hours, which is date arithmetic
- Checking a shipment has an EORI, a commodity code and any required reference, which is a completeness check
- Carrying the same consignor and consignee details across documents, because the facts are already held
- Knowing which files are approaching the end of the 4 year retention period, which is date arithmetic
Needs a customs person
- Classifying goods against a commodity code, which is expert work
- Deciding whether a licence or control applies, which has real consequences
- Deciding what to do when a deadline will be missed, which is a commercial call
The honest summary is that customs work is less automatable than the rest of this cluster, because the expert half sits right in the middle rather than at the end. What is worth separating out is the surrounding repetition, which currently competes for the same person's attention as the classification.
The which tasks run on rules checklist is built for exactly that separation, and the cost of admin time calculator puts a number on the repetition once you have found it.