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Metro’s role in government border strategy
On the 17th December 2020 HM Government (HMG) released its 2025 Border Strategy document, which outlines its intentions for modernising the UK frontier and embraces many technologies and ideas pioneered by Metro.
The 2025 UK Border Strategy sets out the government’s vision for the UK border to be the most effective in the world, with innovations that simplify processes for traders and improves the security and biosecurity of the UK.
This new strategy sets out how the government will work with industry to harness innovative technology to help UK businesses take full advantage of new trading relationships with the rest of the world.
The government is committing to working in partnership with the border industry and users of the border to design, deliver and innovate the border strategy, including the development of upstream compliance, e-documents and a ‘single window’ to avoid duplication of data submission from traders into government.
Metro’s technical team conceive and develop our award-winning MVT supply chain platform and proprietary solutions that keep us at the forefront of our industry, by quantifying and embracing the emerging technologies that add value for our customers.
Metro’s IT experts are actively involved in the development of data exchange standards, including UN/CEFACT projects and were key technical partners in the EU funded CORE project (Consistently Optimised Resilient Secure Global Supply-Chains), to prove the concept and convince the UK Government to adopt a more efficient and modern way of border operation.
It was CORE that ultimately got HMG’s attention and initiate a proof of concept (PoC) to take data from commercial systems for the benefit of government.
The PoC’s data – including participation by Metro’s MVT platform, involving a number of key clients – was shared across government agencies, who responded positively, recognising the benefits of engaging with commercial systems like MVT, that will play a big role in the future border of 2025.
The UK Border Strategy, 2025 says that new data pipelines (such as those demonstrated by MVT) will enable direct ingestion of industry data from participating traders to automate data submission and that they will leverage existing data pipelines to enable the direct ingestion of industry supply chain data into government systems.
The Single Trade Window will be at the heart of this approach, ultimately acting as the point of entry for these data pipelines into government. It is critical that we improve and expand the systems and data pipelines that allow us to share information with our international partners. This is essential for keeping the UK secure.
Successful implementation will smooth trade flows, reduce administrative burden and improve the UK’s position as a global trading nation.
Underpinning this will be a new design authority for the border that will bring together all public sector bodies who design and deliver the border across the UK Government, with expert insight from industry, to take a coordinated approach to border design going forward.
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