Performance Improvement in the Public Sector
Devising a new trade certification process for UK fish exports to the European market. The project created a single-gateway trade certification system that could in future be replicated for other sectors and eventually generate a database on all UK export trade.
The final withdrawal of the UK from the EU in 2021 has had wide-ranging impacts on the conduct of trade, creating an urgent need for entirely new procedures for documenting trade flows and issuing export documentation to enable trade. Nowhere has this been more apparent than in the politically sensitive UK fisheries sector; almost half of the annual 719,000 tonnes of fish landed by UK vessels is exported to the UK’s main fish markets in the EU.
Capgemini Invent was engaged by Defra and the Marine Management Organisation to work in collaboration with several authorities to develop and launch a new EU-compliant export documentation process for trade with the EU and all other third countries, meeting regulatory compliance and improving traceability. This is now known as the Fish Export Service (FES).
It was essential that from the outset the FES would be flexible and simple to use; it needed to be a 24/7 service that was fully inclusive and could be used by people and businesses with varying levels of digital skills and resources, facilitating assisted digital support and helping an industry that is at the mercy of weather conditions and other unexpected events to function smoothly.
Finally, it would have to be simple enough to work well on Day One, but sufficiently robust and flexible to evolve in response to changing regulations and documentation demands.
The digital export documentation service – incorporating QR codes to aid documentation sharing across the supply chain – was deliberately launched as an MVP at the end of 2020 to allow users to familiarise themselves with the service. During the past four years, the application has been further developed so that now individuals and businesses can not only generate UK catch certificates for fish and shellfish, but also for processing and storage documentation. Additionally, it can generate the pre-landing forms required for vessels to land fish directly at an EU port.
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