CCS-UK – the UK’s electronic air cargo community system - has successfully achieved migration to the UK’s new HMRC customs platform, CDS (Customs Declaration Service). This means the CCS-UK community can now submit CDS Customs Declarations through CCS-UK for all air imports and exports.

CDS is already handling all import declarations, and CCS UK was the first community system provider to facilitate this, on 1st January 2021. Following a major and complex development programme, CCS-UK is now fully tested and approved for exports as well as imports, so that users can start to migrate their export declarations to CDS in a controlled manner, during the HMRC migration window.

Says CCS-UK User Group Programme Director Guy Thompson: “The CCS-UK export migration is a major achievement, and testament to the hard work and strong collaboration between BT and its delivery partners, the CCS-UK User Group, CCS-UK users, freight software providers, trade associations and HMRC.”

“In particular, the CCS-UK User Group has made the transition much smoother by initiating and supervising business-focussed testing by key CCS-UK users and their software providers. This is helping to ensure that the critically important flow of goods to and from the UK will not be adversely impacted by the full migration to CDS.”

The UK’s maritime communities, which use other community service providers, will begin export migration in due course.