A data standard for exchanging tariff policy information
Category
[x] Data
[ ] Document
[ ] Technical
[ ] Other Suggestions
Challenge Owner
Simon Worthington (@simonwo), Data Standards Expert, Department for Business and Trade (DBT)
Stephen Corder (@SteveCN7), Tariffs Senior Product Manager, Department for Business and Trade (DBT)
Siân Thomas MBE, Chief Data Officer, Department for Business and Trade (DBT)
Short Description
This challenge aims to establish an open data standard for the exchange of
tariff policy information between all parties involved in international trade
with the United Kingdom.
All UK trade policy is encoded as structured data and entered into a ledger
database. The Department of Business and Trade (DBT) and His Majesty's Revenue
and Customs (HMRC) are responsible for keeping the ledger timely and accurate.
The database derives from the TARIC3 database published by the EU for its Member
States, with some UK-specific modifications to support an independent trading
regime.
HMRC, HM Border Force and DEFRA are responsible for enforcing trade rules for
the United Kingdom. Jersey and Guernsey have separate customs offices that
enforce rules for the Channel Islands. These bodies all consume the database and
use the data to apply the correct trade rules at the right time.
Outside government, there's a broad international trade community that also
consumes the database. Freight companies, other national governments and other
large organisations pull the data into their own systems. GOV.UK services such
as the Online Tariff Service also consume the database to provide a
human-friendly view.
TARIC3 is not standardised – it is a long-standing database that the EU
maintains for its own purposes. There is no open canonical documentation on how
the data works or what it means. There is currently no record of how the UK has
modified TARIC3 structures and semantics to work for its own needs. This makes
it challenging to build or procure new software that can work with UK tariff
data.
We will need to update the way we communicate tariff information as the user
needs of both tariff data publishers and consumers in the UK changes over time.
We also may need to respond to the EU's changes to TARIC3 to keep our UK
specific modifications compatible, which makes things easier for consumers. We
need a way to propose and agree changes amongst ourselves in line with the Open
Standards Principles.
By standardising the schema and semantics for tariff data in an open standard
with clear, precise language and publicly accessible governance arrangements, we
will ensure that future changes can be made in a stable and controlled way and
with full visibility to everyone in the international trade community that uses
our tariff data.
There is a broad set of organisations that work with tariff data:
UK government departments author the data and consume it to provide services
to the other groups in this list, such as HMRC's Online Tariff Service which
displays tariff rates and rules for individual products to SME users, or
Defra's IPAFFS service which provides biosecurity monitoring for imports of
animal and plant products
Customs officers in HMRC and Crown dependencies Guernsey and Jersey consume
the data to enforce customs rules, such as applying the correct amount of
taxation on declared imports and restricting the exportation of controlled
goods like firearms subject to licenses
Logistics providers, other national governments, and their suppliers
consume the data in bulk to power their business processes, such as
pre-calculating the possible import duty on future shipments, ensuring
supplied documentation is up to date prior to declaration, or providing
guidance to their own users
Independent international traders, such as manufacturers, supermarkets,
and farmers, consume a subset of the data for their own products of interest
or supply chain, and are also interested in future changes to the data to
prepare for changes in legislation
Within each of these organisations, there are a set of users who have different
jobs to be done with tariff data:
Technical architects and engineers need to consult the standard to learn
about its data structures and how to solve problems using the data
User-centred designers and business analysts need to understand what
each part of the tariff data means and how it changes to integrate the data
into their services and processes
Project managers need to know about upcoming changes so that they can plan
work effectively
Policy owners need to design policy that is easy to operationalise by
understanding the capabilities of the data formats and therefore the systems
that consume them
Whilst the Department for Business and Trade does the lion’s share of data
management for the UK Tariff, they work with over 30 different policy teams from
11 departments who are actually setting the trade policy. HMRC also contributes
quota volumes and VAT/excise rates to the final dataset. In the future, we
expect more of those departments to want to hold and contribute data about their
policy directly. Part of our mission with setting out this standard is to make
it easier for those teams to understand how to contribute.
Expected Benefits
We expect an open standard to bring the following benefits:
Removal of ambiguity around how tariff data works: given that there is no
canonical and exhaustive documentation, Government systems that have been
developed by different suppliers are not completely aligned on the semantics
or validation rules. This causes significant operational headache as data
moves between systems. We expect a standard to provide a clear and unambiguous
interpretation of data to all suppliers and make procuring support and
modifications more straightforward.
Standardisation of non-structural elements: where TARIC3 provides a data
structure, it does not include other key aspects that require standardisation,
such as the precise semantic meaning of fields, or sources/content of key code
lists and their meanings. This information is equally important for correct
interpretation of data. Without well-defined definitions, this information has
to be reverse-engineered by comparing data to the textual content of trade
legislation which is labour intensive and error-prone.
Governance around changes: historically Government departments have made
changes to tariff data interfaces unilaterally. These decisions have at best
been made bilaterally between major Government users and without necessarily
considering or informing smaller operators or non-Government users. This
practice risks breaking key services or business processes downstream. We
expect an open standard to provide a public mechanism to feedback on proposed
standard changes and avoid breakage of consumers.
Clarification of relationship to TARIC3: we do not believe that the
changes the UK needed to make to TARIC3 to support an independent trade regime
are currently well understood and that most users assume that the EU and UK
treatment are identical. There is therefore risk that users misinterpret UK
data. We expect an open standard to clarify this position, make clear what
parts of the standard are divergent from TARIC3, and advise users on how to
reconcile these differences.
Joined up approach to upstream changes: today there is significant risk
that Government departments would diverge on their response to upstream
changes in TARIC3 because these changes are likely to manifest at contract
renegotiation time with system suppliers. This plays into the ambiguity
problem above and risks further divergence amongst key systems. There is also
little incentive for UK system owners to keep pace with changes to TARIC3 but
significant benefit of doing this for the end-user. We expect an open standard
to bring users together to make a holistic response as "one trade community"
to upstream changes.
Open the door to future shared standard: whilst incentives are not
currently well aligned between the EU and UK to collaborate on a shared
treatment of tariff data, we expect an open declaration of behaviour and
mature governance groups to be a stepping stone towards any possible future
standard that works for the entirety of the European continent and beyond.
Functional Needs
Allow full expression of the UK's independent trade regime and include
Duties that apply to goods imported from other countries and territories
Conditions that need to be met to import or export certain goods
Quantities of goods that can be imported with reduced rates
The legislative basis for these duties, conditions and quotas
Record validity periods for these policies to the precision of a single day.
Record a full version history of the data as first-class, allowing users to
understand what changes are being made to the data and remain informed of
corrections to errors.
Be backwards compatible with TARIC3 data structures, so that large systems
that already expect data in this format do not have to be redesigned.
Title
Category
Challenge Owner
Short Description
This challenge aims to establish an open data standard for the exchange of tariff policy information between all parties involved in international trade with the United Kingdom.
All UK trade policy is encoded as structured data and entered into a ledger database. The Department of Business and Trade (DBT) and His Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC) are responsible for keeping the ledger timely and accurate. The database derives from the TARIC3 database published by the EU for its Member States, with some UK-specific modifications to support an independent trading regime.
HMRC, HM Border Force and DEFRA are responsible for enforcing trade rules for the United Kingdom. Jersey and Guernsey have separate customs offices that enforce rules for the Channel Islands. These bodies all consume the database and use the data to apply the correct trade rules at the right time.
Outside government, there's a broad international trade community that also consumes the database. Freight companies, other national governments and other large organisations pull the data into their own systems. GOV.UK services such as the Online Tariff Service also consume the database to provide a human-friendly view.
TARIC3 is not standardised – it is a long-standing database that the EU maintains for its own purposes. There is no open canonical documentation on how the data works or what it means. There is currently no record of how the UK has modified TARIC3 structures and semantics to work for its own needs. This makes it challenging to build or procure new software that can work with UK tariff data.
We will need to update the way we communicate tariff information as the user needs of both tariff data publishers and consumers in the UK changes over time. We also may need to respond to the EU's changes to TARIC3 to keep our UK specific modifications compatible, which makes things easier for consumers. We need a way to propose and agree changes amongst ourselves in line with the Open Standards Principles.
By standardising the schema and semantics for tariff data in an open standard with clear, precise language and publicly accessible governance arrangements, we will ensure that future changes can be made in a stable and controlled way and with full visibility to everyone in the international trade community that uses our tariff data.
You can also read answers to the 47 open standard assessment questions.
User Need
There is a broad set of organisations that work with tariff data:
Within each of these organisations, there are a set of users who have different jobs to be done with tariff data:
Whilst the Department for Business and Trade does the lion’s share of data management for the UK Tariff, they work with over 30 different policy teams from 11 departments who are actually setting the trade policy. HMRC also contributes quota volumes and VAT/excise rates to the final dataset. In the future, we expect more of those departments to want to hold and contribute data about their policy directly. Part of our mission with setting out this standard is to make it easier for those teams to understand how to contribute.
Expected Benefits
We expect an open standard to bring the following benefits:
Functional Needs