Preventing Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) goods being unnecessarily held on entry to the UK

This guide is based on issues that have seen consignments held at the border. It covers action to take on the submission of pre-notifications to Defra’s Import of products, animals, food and feed system (IPAFFS) and customs declarations to the Customs Declaration Service (CDS). This will ensure that Defra’s Automatic Licence Verification System (ALVS) is able to link declarations to pre-notification and facilitate automatic clearance once any checks that are required have taken place.

You must correctly complete and submit required pre-notifications to IPAFFS

Common Heath Entry Document (CHED)s in draft
Do not leave your pre-notification in draft in IPAFFS. You must submit your pre-notification to IPAFFs.

Delivery address
Check that the delivery address for your pre-notification includes the correct country.

Correctly completing your customs declaration

 1. In data element 2/3 of your customs declaration(s) you must:

• Use the correct document code for the type of pre-notification required (see below table for CHED types). The UK’s Integrated Online Tariff (https://www.trade- tariff.service.gov.uk/find_commodity) 
  provides information on which commodities require which type of pre-notification.
• Ensure that the correct pre-notification reference has been input and in the correct format. Please note that the CDS and CHED reference codes will be formatted differently. You will need to copy the reference code in the correct format from IPAFFS. IPAFFS will provide the correct format for CDS so it can be copied and pasted. The correct format for CDS is: GBCHDYYYY.NNNNNNN where Y stands for the year and N for a number.

2. Check the commodity code (data elements 6/14 and 6/15) on your customs declaration(s) is the same as the commodity code on your pre-notification. ALVS only matches according to how many digits there were on the pre-notification.
3. Check the net mass (data element 6/1) or where required supplementary units for live animals (data element 6/2) on your customs declaration(s) exactly matches that entered on your pre- notification.

Special Characters
Do not include the special character “\” (backslash) in goods description and free text fields. If a backslash (“\”) is present your customs declaration will need to be invalidated and resubmitted without backslashes.

Country of dispatch
Make sure you have included the country of dispatch in data element 5/14 at header level. If you do not include this data at header level your declaration will need to be invalidated and resubmitted.

Complex relationships between pre-notification and customs declaration

ALVS can successfully apply data matching on multiple pre-notifications declared on a single customs declaration and against multiple items on a single customs declaration.

ALVS can also match where a single pre-notification is applied across several customs declarations.

If you are using a single pre-notification across multiple declarations or across multiple items on a single declaration, the information above must be correct on all declarations or items.

If submitting more than one customs declaration for goods covered by a pre-notification you may receive an X00 error on submission of the first declaration until the second one is submitted.

Many pre-notifications to many customs declarations

Automatic clearance through ALVS cannot be given where multiple pre-notifications are covered across multiple customs declarations. Before making your pre-notifications you should consider whether you can pre-notify and declare differently to avoid this “many to many” situation. For example, where possible, keeping multiple pre-notifications covering the same exporter and importer on a single customs declaration using multiple line items.

Annex A: Table of pre-notification types and document codes

Kind regards,

Trader Engagement & Readiness Team
Biosecurity, Borders and Trade Programme
Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs

*Defra Personal Information Charter: here