Building an open data standard for UK trade
DEPARTMENT FOR BUSINESS AND TRADE
The Department of Business and Trade (DBT) is a UK government department that promotes and supports international trade to and from the UK.
To keep the international trade machine operating smoothly, everyone taking part in UK trade needs a clear and accurate understanding of the rules. Government needs to constantly respond to changes in global conditions with agile and effective policy that keeps international trade working well for the UK.
When Government updates trading rules, there's a wide community of people both inside and outside of the UK who need to understand how to trade. Organisations of all sizes like individual farmers, national supermarkets and international freight companies all want to understand how changes in trade policy will affect them.
The challenge
Trade rules are a federated concern of the UK Government, meaning that multiple different Government departments set different aspects of trade policy that pertain to their area of expertise. For example, the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) set the rules on biosecurity, covering the checks required to import animal and plant products. Similarly, the Department for Culture, Media and Sport set the rules on movement of antique and culturally significant goods.
The ultimate source for all trade policy is legislation laid by these departments and ratified by Parliament. Once laid, all UK trade policy is encoded as structured data and entered into a ledger database. DBT and HMRC are responsible for keeping the ledger timely and accurate. It records all UK trade rules all the way back to 1970 and has over 2.5 million records.
Once the rules are set they then need to be enforced. HMRC, HM Border Force and Defra are responsible for enforcing trade rules for the United Kingdom. Jersey and Guernsey have separate customs offices that enforce rules for the Channel Islands. These bodies all consume the ledger and use the data to apply the correct trade rules at the right time.
Outside of Government, there's a broad international trade community that also consumes the database. Freight companies and other large organisations pull the data into their own systems. GOV.UK services such as the Online Tariff Service also consume the database to provide a human-friendly view.
All of these users spoke the common language of the ledger database when they contribute or consume data, but there is no canonical documentation on how the data works or what it means. If Government wanted to evolve the language, there's nowhere for it to collaborate with the wider international trade community. Historically, Government simply made the changes it needed to and it was up to downstream consumers to handle the change in meaning, often with little notice.
DBT wanted to standardise the language of the ledger database and introduce a new open governance group comprised of everyone who needs to work with it. The aim was to evolve the language for communicating trade policy with the whole international trade community and make contributing and consuming trade policy data easier and more reliable. Better data means Government and the private sector can deliver higher quality services.
What we did
In 2021, we delivered the new ledger database of UK tariff rules for DBT. We were invited back to use our extensive knowledge of UK tariff rules together with our capability at developing open data standards to build a new open data standard for managing the data language of the UK trade tariff.
We formalised the existing technical manual about tariff data into a more rigorous and exhaustive standard. We used our own model of the different categories of content needed by users at different times in the data use lifecycle to ensure the needs of all of the standard's different users would be met. We developed a large amount of extra content covering validation rules, example data queries, semantic meaning and standard governance.
We also established an open governance group comprised of all of the major stakeholders to take on the regular management of the standard, including meetings and async discussions of proposed changes. We set out the terms of reference for its operation, and after the first successful meetings we handed over the running of the group to a permanent secretariat.
As we worked we recorded weeknotes which capture the development process, to help establish a culture of working in the open around the standard and also to help other Government teams on the same journey. We also published blog posts and an open consultation about the proposed new standard.
The result
The open governance group has been engaged with by all major stakeholders and has continued to meet since we handed over to the secretariat. Delegates from all stakeholders have taken part in useful discussion in response to proposed changes.
We took the UK Tariff Data Standard through the UK government's open standard ratification process. We successfully passed the 47 tests of an open standard and our work was recognised and recommended for adoption by a subgroup of the Open Standards Board.