Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask His Majesty's Government how much beef was (1) exported, and (2) imported, in the years (a) 2022, (b) 2021, (c) 2020, and (d) 2019.

HM Revenue & Customs (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.

Classification codes (according to the Harmonised System) are available to assist you in accessing published trade statistics data in the UK Global Tariff. Goods moving to and from the UK are identified by an eight-digit commodity code. These are publicly available from the UK Trade Tariff.

Beef falls within commodity code chapter headings 0201 and 0202. The full commodity code would depend on the specific compounds of the beef.  There could be additional commodity codes that have not been included, that could be considered as ‘Beef’ depending upon the requestor’s specific definition.

The amount of beef exported from and imported to the UK in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2022 is in the attached table and can be found on the UK Trade Information website and on Gov.uk.