NCTS Phase 5 - Sequoia Development Update - April 2024
To meet the requirements of the Common Transit Convention (CTC), all member countries must transition to phase 5 by 21st January 2025. UK NCTS phase 5 is due to go live on 1st July 2024.
After the UK NCTS5 service goes live, there will be a cutover period during which the NCTS4 service will continue running only to deal with in-flight transit declarations submitted before the go-live date. The NCTS5 service will handle all new transit declarations submitted from the go-live date onwards
There are significant changes being made to transit. 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 and 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+ EU and CTC transit countries and territories is complicated.
Sequoia development
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. This functionality is currently being developed.
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 anticipate the NCTS 5 functionality will be available in Sequoia by the end of May 2024, although you will not be able to use it until 1st July when the system goes live. Unfortunately HMRC have not provided a trader test service in which you can practise the new declarations.
We will be holding a webinar shortly to demonstrate what we have developed so far and to give you more information.
