French Customs Authority Disruption - Calais 8th August 2023

7 Aug 2023

On Tuesday 8 August, the French customs authority is replacing its main IT server. This will cause outages on impacted French customs systems from 8am-4pm (UK time) on Tuesday 8th August. This will impact all French teleservices linked to customs clearance (Delta-G [declarations] and Delta-T [Transit]), and whilst SI Brexit may remain functional, it will not work effectively due to links to the other systems.

At the Port of Calais empty trucks will be rerouted to the green lane, whilst goods-carrying movements will be directed to the orange lane car parks for manual inspection by the customs office.

Transit movements to France cannot be routed through a green lane, so they will be directed to the orange lane car parks for manual inspection by the customs office. To speed up this process, France has requested that hardcopy paper TADs (Transit Accompanying Documents) are held by drivers for inspection – French officials will take photographs of the paper TADS for later updating of NCTS.

For Transit movements from France GVMS has functionality to move manual transit movements, the trader should use ‘SAD declaration’ and enter the manual transit reference number generated under fallback. GVMS will automatically direct these movements to attend a Border Force facility for authentication of their documents. Border Force will then process all manual OoT functions and OoDes functions if applicable.

Pre-lodged declaration movements are harder to accommodate, and paper fall back processes should be utilised (this is understood to impact French companies more). Fallback procedures for Delta-G and Delta-T will be authorised from 8am (UK time) on the 8th and accompanying documents should be in paper form.

French customs are putting additional customs officers on the ground to speed up on-site processes and additional truck parking spaces have been generated, including at Calais – the overall impact is expected to be lessened thanks to the strong volume of mitigating measures and preparation.

France has informed carriers including DFDS, P&O, Irish Ferries and Eurotunnel, who have been asked to spread traffic during the day to allow for the additional manual processes, and who have been asked to disseminate these messages to the trade.

NOTE - This will not affect exports from France to the UK, which will be processed as normal.