UK Issues Guidance About Issues Affecting Electronic Export Licensing

Traders may be encountering electronic export licensing issues due to “temporary” problems affecting data flows between the country’s Custom Declaration Service and the Department for Business and Trade’s electronic licensing systems, including SPIRE and LITE, the U.K. said in an Aug. 23 guidance notice.

The U.K. said these issues are occurring when an export declaration with the Custom Declaration Service “contains errors which affect the licence. As a result, the declaration cannot progress to a cleared status.” Exporters should check they are “quoting the correct licence reference in Data Element (DE) 2/3 and have entered the exact characters, removing any whitespace characters such as spaces.” They should also make sure that the information within DE 2/3 has “been completed correctly before the declaration is submitted.”

The notice includes several steps exporters should take to resolve or troubleshoot the issue, including what to do if a declaration is “‘stuck’ in a registered state” and what to do if the exporter has received various error codes.