Oliver St John, Cabinet Office
Creating interoperable, frictionless digital trade is an ambition that many governments around the world share and its central to the UK Government’s 2025 Border Strategy. As well as making trade more efficient for business to business transactions, creating digitised trade corridors has the potential to transform how borders work, replacing paperwork and other requirements with assured data shared automatically between industry and government. This will drive down the costs of trade, benefiting all the businesses within a supply chain, whether they export or import.
As with any major transition it is no simple thing to build this new model of international trade and collaboration between the public and private sector will be key to transforming the way trade works.
On the Government side, we need to ensure that our legislation, systems and ways of working enable a digitised approach. The UK is aiming to be a leader in this space. With the Electronic Trade Documents Bill we have created the legal foundation for the use of digital trade documents in international trade processes. We are also building our new UK Single Trade Window which aims not only to create a single digital gateway for traders to provide and manage the trade data they share with the Government, but also to realise our ambition to integrate supply chain data into our border systems. Alongside this, we have been working with industry consortia within our ‘Ecosystem of Trust’ pilots, to develop and test new models for using these new sources of data, and wider technological assurance mechanism, to remove trade frictions and move towards a world where seamless movements across borders makes trade simpler and cheaper across supply-chains. Collaboration at the data-level and effective information governance will be key to these most advanced models of trade. Developing the mechanisms by which the private and public sector can share trade data in extensible ways will be key, as will ensuring that all the actors within a trade corridor are able to control who can use their data for what purposes.
The remaining public policy challenge then is to integrate this new approach to using data into the policies and process by which the Government implements its borders and trade system. The draft Border Target Operating Model we have just published, and are in the process of testing with traders, sets out our proposals for integrating technology, digitisation and data into the UK’s import regime. By doing so it seeks to deliver a data-driven, risk-based approach to import controls that makes trading simpler and cheaper, while implementing the critical controls that keep the UK safe.
We in government cannot realise this vision alone, and this is where collaboration with businesses and our trade partners will be key. Using technology to share data in new ways will require new, shared governance, it will require a collaborative approach to the design of our borders and trade systems and processes, and more trust between government and private sector organisations involved in supply-chains. Critically, it will also need businesses to invest in and adopt these new models. To develop a truly global model of digital trade we need to ensure that as these models evolve we build them, not just at the national level, but in partnership with trade and business bodies around the world who can provide the support and challenge needed to align the approaches of different nations.
If we can overcome these challenges through greater collaboration, the benefits for everyone will be transformative. The costs of trade will fall, and with new ways to trade simply it will be easier than ever for companies to begin to trade for the first time. The public sector and taxpayers will reap rewards beyond the economic benefits that come with increased trade intensity. Digitisation and automation will allow us to deliver secure borders more efficiently, and with new sources of data border agencies will be able to secure our borders more effectively.
The UK Government is committed to this vision, and we want to collaborate with the ICC and others wherever we can to make it a reality.
