Invitation from HMRC to Participate in the Single Trade Window Survey
HMRC invite you to take part in a brief questionnaire regarding the Single Trade Window (STW).
Completing the questionnaire should take no more than one hour.
As you may be aware, the Government paused the delivery of the STW in November last year. Our internal policy development has continued, with a particular focus on ensuring that any updates to the system deliver real value to businesses and strengthen the UK’s border processes.
We have now entered a phase of active engagement with industry and are eager to collect a broad range of views to inform the next stage of our policy development. Your input is invaluable to us, as the questionnaire seeks to understand your experience with current government systems—especially regarding duplicated data, areas where systems or processes cause friction, and aspects that add cost or complexity to your operations.
Alongside this, The European Union have also recently announced plans to build an EU Customs Data Hub to centralise and unify a large number of existing systems and deliver greater visibility across the supply chain. We’re actively thinking about their ambitions here and would value any views you have on those plans as part of this engagement.
Your feedback will help us refine our understanding of the challenges that a STW could address, shaping future options and improvements. We appreciate your time and perspective.
We’re also cognisant that we’re still evolving our baseline systems post-Brexit and are aware of the importance of the developments of existing systems to industry. We are therefore keen to understand where the biggest challenges are for stakeholders and what they would want to prioritise at the border.
Finally, I’m sure many of you were also engaged as part of the previous STW programme, and other going Government-Industry engagement. That detail has proved extremely helpful in our thinking so far and thank you again for the time you took to do that. We’ve been through the detail of it and have a good sense of what you wanted an STW to do for you.
Obviously, that was a couple of years ago now and a lot has changed since then. A key aspect of this engagement will be to either validate or challenge that feedback – not merely repeat it. That idea is reflected in the questionnaire, but we’d really welcome any further views you have on if/how your views have changed.
Some of the questions asked may not be relevant to you, your business or your organisation, please do not feel the need to answer every question.
You may feel more comfortable or prefer to feedback verbally, please do let us know if that’s the case and we can arrange a 1-1 session.
Please access the questionnaire using this link: STW SURVEY.
It would be of great assistance if you could complete and submit this questionnaire by Wednesday 3rd June 2026.
If you have any questions or require further information, do not hesitate to get in touch with:
Jacob Cooke, Head of Customs Regime Strategy Implementation
Monica Saunders, Border Information & Single Trade Window Policy
