Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what was the volume of uranium imports by country of origin in each year since 2000.

HMRC is responsible for the collection and publication of data on imports and exports of goods to and from the UK. HMRC releases this information monthly, as a National Statistic called the Overseas Trade in Goods Statistics (OTS), which is available via their dedicated website: www.uktradeinfo.com. From this website, it is also possible to build your own data tables based upon bespoke search criteria: https://www.uktradeinfo.com/trade-data/ots-custom-table/.

Uranium falls within commodity code chapter heading 2844: ‘radioactive chemical elements and radioactive isotopes (including the fissile or fertile chemical elements and isotopes) and their compounds; mixtures and residues containing these products’. The full Commodity code would depend on the specific compounds of the uranium.

UK Imports, by country of origin, are only published from 2016 via the large bulk datasets available to download from here: https://www.uktradeinfo.com/trade-data/latest-bulk-datasets/.

Data on uranium imported into the UK prior to 2016 is available on: www.uktradeinfo.com. This provides the country of dispatch, which means the country from which the goods were last exported before coming to the UK. This may be different from the country of origin.

A table showing the volume of Uranium imported into the UK by Country of Origin from 2016-2022 is provided separately.

Until 2022, Country of Origin was only collected via the Customs declaration for UK imports from Non-EU countries. In some cases, EU countries can be declared in the country of origin for movements of goods dispatched from Non-EU countries.

Up until 2022, Trade in goods movements dispatched from EU countries were collected via the Intrastat Survey, which did not capture country of origin.