Trade & Customs Watch — week ending 13 November 2026

Trade & Customs Watch is our weekly briefing on the customs, tariff and trade-regulatory developments that matter to businesses moving goods across borders and to the administrations that control them. Each item is drawn from the primary record and linked to it, with a short note on what it means in practice.

The week in brief

The Council of the European Union reached a general approach on removing the €150 ceiling from the VAT Import One-Stop Shop, bringing the VAT side of the EU’s e-commerce reform into line with the customs side, with application from 1 July 2028. The Commission also published harmonised guidance on importing electricity under Centralised Clearance for Import, a procedure that has until now been applied differently from one Member State to another. In the United Kingdom, the countervailing duty on rainbow trout from Turkey was extended to January 2031 following an expiry review, and HMRC updated its CBAM policy summary for a third time this autumn, with the mechanism now less than two months from its 1 January 2027 start. Kenya began blocking clearance of consignments that lack a digitally issued, locally underwritten marine cargo insurance certificate, and Viet Nam’s amended Customs Law, which makes e-commerce platform operators customs declarants in their own right, is now less than four months from entry into force.

EU: Council agrees to remove the €150 threshold from the VAT Import One-Stop Shop

DG TAXUD, 9 November 2026. The Commission welcomed the Council’s general approach on a Directive removing the €150 ceiling from the VAT Import One-Stop Shop (IOSS). Once adopted, sellers and online marketplaces will be able to declare and pay import VAT on all distance sales of goods from outside the EU through a single registration, whatever the value of the consignment; excise goods remain excluded. The IOSS and the deemed-supplier rules will also extend to goods sold from the new customs warehouses for distance sales created under the revised Union Customs Code, and an implementing act will harmonise the criteria for intermediaries acting on behalf of non-EU traders. The rules are to apply from 1 July 2028, when the EU Customs Data Hub is due to become operational, and the Commission is to review the scheme by 1 December 2030. The European Parliament must be consulted again before the Council formally adopts the text. The announcement is published by DG TAXUD.

What it means. The VAT reform now tracks the customs reform. The customs duty exemption for consignments under €150 is being withdrawn under the new Union Customs Code, and from July 2028 the VAT scheme that was built around the same threshold will cease to be capped by it. For non-EU sellers and platforms this is simplification with a price: a single IOSS registration will cover every consignment, but the deemed-supplier rules will apply to every consignment too, and the intermediary arrangements that many non-EU traders rely on will be standardised by implementing act. Businesses selling into the EU above €150 today, and therefore outside IOSS, should plan to bring those flows inside it, which means aligning order, logistics and tax data well before 2028. A general approach is not a final adoption, so the detail can still move, but the direction is now settled.

EU: harmonised guidance on electricity imports under Centralised Clearance

DG TAXUD, 6 November 2026. The Commission published guidance harmonising the customs treatment of electricity imported into the Union under Centralised Clearance for Import (CCI), replacing differing national practices with a standardised approach. The guidance covers entry in the declarant’s records, the CCI authorisation, the declaration and customs supervision. It recognises that electricity cannot be presented to customs physically: the declaration data sit in the trader’s own systems, no presentation notification is required at release for free circulation, and supervision rests mainly on post-release documentary checks. It also addresses the CBAM requirements that apply to imported electricity, the determination of its origin, and the treatment of customs duty, VAT and excise. The guidance is available from DG TAXUD.

What it means. Electricity is the clearest case of a good that customs law was not written for, and for operators importing power across the Union’s external frontier, from the United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland, the Western Balkans or Ukraine, the practical questions have been answered differently depending on the Member State of entry. A single approach to authorisation and supervision allows an importer to centralise its declarations in one Member State and apply one method everywhere, which matters more now that the EU CBAM is in its definitive period and electricity is one of the covered goods. For administrations, the guidance is a useful template for supervising goods that cannot be presented, where control necessarily shifts from the border to the declarant’s records and to documentary checks after release.

UK: countervailing duty on rainbow trout from Turkey extended to 2031

Department for Business and Trade, 5 November 2026. Trade remedies notice 2026/31 gives effect to the Secretary of State’s acceptance of the Trade Remedies Authority’s recommendation in expiry review ER0080, initiated on 22 January 2026. The countervailing duty on rainbow trout originating in Turkey, covering live, fresh, chilled, frozen and smoked fish within size limits set out in the notice and classified under headings 0301, 0302, 0303, 0304 and 0305, is extended for five years to 30 January 2031 at the existing rates, with no recalculation. Exporter-specific rates range from 1.5 per cent to 8 per cent, two groups of listed exporters pay 6.9 per cent and 7.6 per cent, and all other exporters pay 9.5 per cent. The notice took effect on 6 November 2026, with the variation applying from 30 January 2026, and supersedes taxation notice 2021/12. The notice is published on GOV.UK.

What it means. This is the UK’s expiry-review machinery working as designed: a measure inherited from the EU at the end of the transition period has now been reviewed on UK evidence and continued on UK terms. Importers of Turkish trout should budget for the duty through to January 2031 and check that the additional code declared on the Customs Declaration Service matches the exporter named on the invoice, because the exporter-specific rate is available only where a valid commercial invoice carrying the declaration in Annex 3 of the notice is presented; without it the residual 9.5 per cent applies. Because the rates are unchanged and the variation runs from the original expiry date, no retrospective adjustment arises for goods already cleared.

UK: HMRC updates the CBAM policy summary ahead of the January 2027 start

HMRC, 2 November 2026. HMRC updated its policy summary for the UK Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM) to add information on calculating Carbon Price Relief, following earlier updates on 9 September and 16 October 2026 that reflected the laying of the Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (Emissions and Verification) Regulations 2026. The summary confirms that the UK CBAM will commence on 1 January 2027 and will apply to specified aluminium, cement, fertiliser, hydrogen, and iron and steel goods identified by commodity code in its Annex, with certain scrap codes excluded, that the system boundaries reflect those of the UK Emissions Trading Scheme, that goods of UK origin are out of scope, and that a £50,000 minimum registration threshold applies. The summary is published on GOV.UK.

What it means. With seven weeks to go, the published position is now detailed enough to act on. Importers of covered goods should run the £50,000 threshold test against their forward import plans, establish how they will obtain verified emissions data from overseas producers, and gather the evidence of carbon prices paid abroad that Carbon Price Relief will require. The UK CBAM is a tax rather than a customs duty, so the customs declaration is not where liability is settled, but the commodity code on that declaration is what brings a consignment within scope. A UK–EU summit expected later this month is widely reported to address the linking of the two emissions trading systems; any exemption that flows from linkage would be prospective and would depend on legislation on both sides that has not yet been made. Until it is, importers from the EU should plan on the basis of the published rules, modelling both the exempted and the non-exempted outcome.

Kenya: digital marine cargo insurance now a condition of customs clearance

Kenya Revenue Authority, 22 October 2026 (in force 1 November 2026). A public notice from the Commissioner for Customs and Border Control, issued in collaboration with the Insurance Regulatory Authority (IRA), confirms that with effect from 1 November 2026 all consignments entering Kenya must be covered by a valid Marine Cargo Insurance policy issued by an IRA-licensed insurer. The insurance certificate must be processed through the Digital Marine Cargo Insurance System and successfully transmitted to the Integrated Customs Management System (iCMS) before a customs declaration is lodged. Consignments that do not meet these requirements will be blocked from clearance. The notice is published by the Kenya Revenue Authority.

What it means. The requirement to insure imports locally is long-standing in Kenyan law; what has changed is enforcement, which has moved from the audit trail to the clearance gate, with the customs system refusing a declaration that has no matching insurance record. Importers buying on CIF or CIP terms, where the seller arranges cover abroad, need to re-paper their contracts so that cover is placed with a Kenyan insurer, or accept a second policy. Clearing agents should confirm that the certificate has reached iCMS before lodging, because a consignment held at Mombasa or an inland border post for want of an insurance record incurs storage and demurrage that no later correction recovers. For administrations, this is a clean example of a regulator’s register being made a validation condition in the customs system, a model that is increasingly used for permits, licences and certificates of all kinds.

Viet Nam: amended Customs Law brings e-commerce platforms into the declarant regime from March 2027

National Assembly of Viet Nam, Law No. 11/2026/QH16 of 23 August 2026 (in force 1 March 2027). The Law Amending and Supplementing a Number of Articles of the Customs Law adds e-commerce platform managers to the list of customs declarants and extends to them the declarant’s obligations. A new Article 16a provides that goods exported or imported through e-commerce platforms must go through customs procedures and are subject to customs inspection and supervision, requires electronic identification and authentication of Vietnamese buyers and sellers, requires platform managers to connect to the customs authority’s e-commerce data processing system, and obliges platform managers, bonded warehouse operators, carriers and agents to provide information on such goods to customs, with detailed rules left to the Government. New Articles 17 and 17a establish a compliance and risk management framework under which compliant declarants are considered for priority treatment and reduced inspection. The text of the law is available in English.

What it means. Viet Nam joins the growing group of jurisdictions that treat the platform, rather than the individual consignee, as the party answerable to customs for cross-border e-commerce, a model the EU is adopting through its deemed-importer rules. Platforms selling into Viet Nam should expect to register as declarants, to build a data connection to the customs e-commerce system and to identify their Vietnamese buyers and sellers electronically, and should begin that work now, because the implementing rules are still to be issued and the effective date is fixed. The compliance management provisions are the other half of the bargain: traders with a good record are to be rewarded with lighter control, which is the trade-off that underpins every modern risk-based customs regime. Administrations considering a platform-declarant model will find Article 16a a compact statement of the obligations involved.

Trade & Customs Watch is compiled from primary sources: HMRC, the Department for Business and Trade, the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Taxation and Customs Union, the World Customs Organization and national customs administrations. Items are summarised; the linked record is authoritative. Commentary is our own and is general in nature, not advice on any particular transaction. To discuss what any of these developments means for your business or administration, contact us.