Thanks to the South Cambridgeshire small-business owner for explaining the fuss around the European Customs Union

For most people, the customs union is probably a hidden irrelevance. Apart from walking through a blue or green channel at the airport after your holiday, what difference does it make? Yet almost every object you pick up has probably had at least some of its constituent parts imported, and the efforts of the manufacturer to comply with customs will be embodied in the price and availability of all those products.

As a small business-owner, I had an insight into the value of the customs union this week. I had to ship two pieces of R&D equipment abroad – one to USA and one to Belgium.

For the US, we had to state what the equipment was, and what its value is. We paid a premium for next day delivery for the US package, but when we asked our customer if they received it, they had not. So we tracked it, and it was still at East Midlands airport. We called the courier – they never seem to call us – and they said it was stuck in customs because they needed a document proving that certain parts of the equipment were originally received from the US. We did not have this, but our customer did so we asked him. He was on holiday. We told this to the courier company and they said we could either wait, or send it without the document but pay duty. How much was the duty? we asked. They didn’t know. You only seem to find out after it goes through customs and that’s a different organisation. So we had to wait another day. We then passed the information to the courier, but again, the next morning, the package was still at East Midlands. No word from the courier, so we called to ask why. The wanted our VAT number. Actually they already had it, but hadn’t looked it up. We passed on the number and eventually the package went. The next-day premium service arrived at our customer in the US on day 9. We are sending staff out to install the equipment, and the travel is costing our company a lot of money. Our good organisation to have it all sent over a week in advance was lost with the delay, and it turned up just the day before our trip. Any more delays, and we would have had to call off the trip and rearrange it with an unhappy customer who didn’t want their equipment to be installed late. Had that happened, the additional costs would have reduced our profit substantially, with further time of our staff being spent on more paperwork instead of providing a valuable service to our customer.

And what about the package to Belgium? No documentation necessary. Just put in the address, and when I woke up the next morning it was already there. This is the benefit of a customs union that makes it as easy to ship to European countries as to another UK address.

I am pleased to say we have two happy customers, but if you repeat this sort of experience often enough, things will go wrong and our ability to be a reliable supplier of that service will be diminished compared to our overseas competitors. Behind the scenes, this is the story going on with the manufacturers and suppliers of so many everyday things that we buy. Who would wish such an increased bureaucratic burden on UK businesses?

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