The chairman of the Agency Sector Management (UK) has warned importers, exporters and forwarders to brace themselves for major disruption when UK Customs switches over to a new system on July 1, 2007.
Peter MacSwiney said that current plans to implement new regulations based on the new harmonised SAD (Single Administrative Document) could lead to disaster, as freight forwarders and their staff grapple with completely unfamiliar customs declarations and largely untested software.
Instead, he is urging HM Revenue & Customs to re-visit the merits of adopting a two- to three-month phased approach, as opposed to cutting over the industry en masse to the new system on July 1st.
“The problem is that, under the new system, the current customs declarations won't be accepted any more,” said MacSwiney. “HMRC’s original plan was to run the old and new systems together between March and July, giving forwarders the ability to adapt to the new procedures and uncover any defects of the new system along the way. Having both systems available was a far more pragmatic approach compared to the prospect of a cutover to a new system overnight.”
While the nature of the proposed implementation is such that individual freight forwarders would all have to make the change literally overnight, many difficulties could be avoided and the risk of failure greatly reduced if they made the switch in batches rather than every company in the country switching over on the same day.
MacSwiney pointed out that a simultaneous switchover could result in the complete collapse of freight movements into and out of the country on a scale not seen since the ill-fated introduction of the Travicom system in the 1980s. Unlike Travicom, which affected mainly airfreight imports, problems would affect exports as well, across all modes of transport.
The new harmonised SAD (SADH) is an EU initiative as a precursor to allowing declaration data to be passed between Member States’ computer systems. It includes numerous new data elements and codes and item-level manifest information, all of which could involve more manpower to input the required information.
