Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what assessment he has made of the average response time to customs queries to HMRC through the CHIEF system in the most recent period for which figures are available; and what steps he is taking to improve the response time for businesses seeking customs advice from the CHIEF system.

The CHIEF system has been scaled to 360 million declarations per year as part of HMRC’s preparations for the end of the Transition Period and it continues to perform well. This equates to 111 declarations per second and a message response time of 5 seconds, which is within the service-level agreement for all transactions. HMRC continue to test the performance of the CHIEF system.