Trade facilitation: Simplifying complex policy with an elegant solution

The challenge they faced

When the UK Government negotiated new facilitations for goods moving between Great Britain and Northern Ireland under the Windsor Framework, HMRC committed to ensuring that traders could benefit as easily as possible. This required helping businesses determine and understand the category of their goods—so they could identify which new facilitations applied to them and maximise the number of consignments eligible for the simplified process. The challenge: Enable traders and their supporting service providers to accurately categorise goods and, in turn, access the new facilitations for moving goods from Great Britain to Northern Ireland.
More specifically:

• Policy complexity: The framework introduced three categories of goods (Category 1, 2, and Standard) with rules on sanctions, and certification requirements
• Fluid requirements: Policy details were still being finalised while development needed to begin, creating uncertainty around technical specifications
• Multiple dependencies: Critical government services including the Trader Support Service (TSS) and Trader Goods Profile (TGP) required new technical enablers to build their own services
• Time constraints: The system had to be fully operational from day one of the Windsor Framework’s implementation, and ready early enough to give businesses and connected systems time to prepare.
• Technical complexity: The solution needed to handle potentially infinite permutations of commodity codes, countries of origin, regulatory requirements and exemptions to those requirements.

How we helped

We delivered a comprehensive technical solution that enabled traders and government services to categorise their goods under the new rules of the Windsor Framework, and to keep pace with daily changes in how and where regulations and exemptions are applied.

Strategic approach:

• Rather than waiting for complete policy clarity, we documented assumptions and built flexibility into our delivery model. This enabled immediate progress on 'high certainty’ elements while maintaining adaptability as requirements evolved and solidified.
• We conducted regular show-and-tell sessions with transparent communication of progress and challenges, relying on a collaborative and mutually trusting relationship with stakeholders and working teams to provide crucial insights from their frontline experience. We never assumed a single source of knowledge, but kept lines of communication open, unafraid to admit when we didn’t have an answer... yet.

Technical architecture:

• We connected to live tariff data to automatically capture rules, sanctions, and certification requirements
• We built detailed logic to process multiple variables and guide users to the quickest accurate categorisation
• We enabled other government services to integrate seamlessly with the newly designed categorisation engine
• We created a hybrid system where rules update automatically when relevant changes are made to the Tariff Dataset, with manual override capabilities for edge cases or rules of the Framework that did not express through the tariff dataset, such if goods could carry excise duty.

User experience optimisation:

• We designed intelligent question flows that catered to every potential trade situation (all commodities and all countries, no matter the combination of the two) that minimised user effort by identifying definitive answers early in the process, avoiding unnecessary questions when rules had no exceptions.