Weeknote #1: Beginnings (w/c 2023-08-14)

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Hi and welcome to our first tariff data standards weeknote! I’m Steve Corder and I’m the Senior Product Manager for the Tariff Application Platform (TAP) here at the Department for Business and Trade (DBT). TAP is the data service that creates UK Tariff policy in a data format that is used by our partners in HMRC and the Channel Islands to apply the correct duties on thousands of different goods moving across the UK border.

Over the coming months, my department will be setting out to have the data model we all use recognised as a formal UK Data Standard. This and future weeknotes will allow you to follow us on this journey.

I’m going to assume that if you’re reading this, you’re already aware of how trade tariffs work. So, I’m going to focus in on the data and why we want to set our model up as a formal UK Data Standard.

What is a data standard?

A data standard is an agreed upon approach to allow for consistent measurement, qualification or exchange of an object, process, or unit of information. The data model we use in the UK is based on the TARIC3 (Tarif Intégré Communautaire) model used by the European Union. Our aim is to have this model recognised as a formal UK Government data standard so that anyone who wishes to use the data that DBT provides can have confidence that the data is accurate and that the sources of the data we’ve used are clearly understood and can be referenced if needed.

If you want to know more about UK Government data standards, check out the Data Standards Authority whose departmental aim is to improve how the public sector manages data.

So why are we doing this?

DBT has a very strong data presence and we use data to help us secure better trading outcomes for the UK. We’ve come to realise that the data coming out of TAP is very useful for this as it allows us to assess the current Tariff against proposals and work out the value it brings to the UK economy - this is before mentioning the operational uses! We’re also aware that our data from TAP is used for commercial activities in the private sector that help traders make best use of preferential treatment which we’re keen to support.

With such a wide range of users, our hope is that having a defined standard so that you (the user of the data) knows exactly how we’ve produced the data, what sources we’ve used and how we’ve gone about creating it will provide confidence in our data.

What’s next?

Over the next few months, I’ll be introducing members of the team who are working on this along with how to get involved in the journey.

This isn’t something we’ll achieve overnight and along the way we’ll likely get things wrong or make a misstep. We’ll use these weeknotes to call this out as we move along on this journey. We’ll also start adding more information to our data manual and use the weeknotes to call out new additions or changes.

I’ll leave the weeknote here for today, welcome aboard and I hope this has left you interested in what will happen next.