NCTS Phase 5 deadline extended until July 2024

Following pressure from ASM, alongside other software developers and the wider trade, HMRC have agreed to extend the deadline for migration to NCTS Phase 5 until 1st July 2024.

This follows serious concerns voiced by us that the necessary systems will not be fully developed, stable and tested in time to meet that date and that traders will not be familiar enough with the new procedures and the new data required to enable goods to move undisrupted in the build up to the busiest time of year.

An increasing number of other Common Transit Convention (CTC) countries are also delaying their implementations for similar reasons and the transition period - by which date all contracting parties have to migrate to NCTS 5 - has been recently extended to December 2024.

What is changing

There are significant changes being made. As well as a complete redesign of the transit declaration itself, Phase 5 introduces:

• A single declaration supports up to 99 house consignments, each with up to 999 items.
• Pre-lodgement of declarations
• Amendment of pre-lodged declarations
• Cancellation of declarations
• Presentation of goods
• Enhanced guarantee management and guarantee query
• Registration of any incidents that may occur during transit
• Reporting of major discrepancies and recovery action

As the current (Phase 4) and the new (Phase 5) systems are very different, running them side by side is impossible. Therefore there will not be a period of ‘dual running’ and it will not be possible to use both systems to process the same movement. The transition from one system to another across 35+ CTC transit countries and territories is complicated.

Essentially, any transit movement started using NCTS Phase 4 requirements will be processed through to write off on the Phase 4 system.

All movements started using Phase 5 requirements will be handled entirely on the Phase 5 system.

From a development point of view, in Sequoia the two requirements (Phase 4 and Phase 5) will be kept separate; all of the Phase 5 functionality will be developed as a new module.

In addition, the new transit declaration structure is only compatible with CDS export declarations. Therefore the Phase 5 module in Sequoia will only map data from CDS export declarations.

We don’t have a date yet when we anticipate the NCTS 5 functionality will be available in Sequoia.