Introduction

The Department of International Trade (DIT) is a UK government department formed by Prime Minister Theresa May in 2016 following the UK’s vote to leave the European Union (also referred to as Brexit). It is responsible for negotiating and securing trade agreements between the UK and foreign countries and for encouraging foreign investment and export trade. They also help overseas companies locate and grow in the UK as well as championing free trade.

Challenges

The UK was set to leave the European Union on the 1st January 2021. The UK needed to form a new independent trade policy and have all the systems in place to store, manage and transmit it successfully to various border systems and traders by this deadline.

DIT needed a way to store and manage this new trade policy along with all of the data associated with it and to enable individual traders in the UK and abroad, trade experts and other governments to access it.

This meant that the new system needed to be intuitive, easy to use by non-technical domain experts and to contain all of the data representing the UK trade policy by the 1st January 2021. It also needed to follow existing European data standards, all whilst the new trade policy was in flux.

Solutions

We led a team of 10-14 researchers, designers and developers to build and deliver the new system (called the Tariff Management Tool) to handle all the data associated with the new independent trade policy. We focused on setting direction, making prioritisation decisions and defining agile sprints.

We developed the technical and data architecture for the new system, working to understand and evolve a legacy EU defined data model to ensure that it met the needs of the UK and allowed for efficient digital journeys for the users.

We worked closely with many policy stakeholders across the Department and wider Government - ensuring all requirements were met, that reporting needs were embedded into the data management tool and that everyone was part of the agile process.

We also implemented a training programme to help up-skill team members and to explain the complexities of the legacy data model.

Results

The Tariff Management Tool was delivered with the UK Tariff data on time for the 1st January 2021. This included the complete migration of more than 400k records into the new data management system.

The UK Global Tariff service, which helps users find and compare the tariffs, was launched in May and ran throughout 2021. It offered the UK Global Tariff data as an open data set that is available in both spreadsheet format and as an API. This was well received and led to further research and development on the data and its users, resulting in the release of the full UK Tariff data set.

The full UK Tariff data set is now live and in active use. We continue to support all of the new services and are continuing with our pioneering user research and explorations on different ways to further utilise the data.