Notice

NTE 2023/18: changes to export licensing statistics

Published 11 September 2023

Introduction

Following the recent quarterly publication of the strategic export controls licensing official statistics, this notice advises of a temporary reduction in the data that the Export Control Joint Unit (ECJU) publishes.

Background

In order to meet transparency and statutory obligations, ECJU publishes a wide array of data and statistics on decisions made on export licence applications, primarily through the quarterly strategic export controls licensing Official Statistics and the Strategic Export Controls: Reports and Statistics website (searchable database website).

As LITE functionality is being released incrementally, the ability to publish data from LITE accurately and effectively is still in development. LITE is currently in a private beta phase, with exporters trialling the new service on an invite-only basis, gradually increasing these numbers over time. The vast majority of exporters continue to use the legacy system, whilst a small number of exporters now use LITE, with these exporters submitting a relatively low number of applications – LITE saw an average of around 75 licence application outcomes per quarter during 2022, compared to an average of around 4,500 licence application outcomes per quarter in SPIRE. This has enabled ECJU to manually extract the necessary data from LITE for each case individually, validate and quality assure it, and then blend it with SPIRE data to create an overall view of performance for our publications.

As we progress the development of this new system, with more exporters invited to use LITE, the number of licensing decisions involved means this manual intervention is becoming unsustainable. For 2023 quarter 1, LITE saw 229 licence application outcomes, a 300% increase from the 2022 quarterly average. Case numbers on LITE will continue to increase as more exporters are brought on board and it becomes the dominant system for export licence applications. Further background on this can be found in NTE 2022/02: changes to export licensing statistics and Notice to exporters 2022/15: export controls statistics website data availability.

Impact on how and what we publish

The department remains committed to maintaining a transparent export control system, and the work on effective LITE data publication is progressing in parallel with other workstreams. However, we have taken the difficult decision to focus mainly on getting these future developments right, rather than continuing an increasingly complex and time-consuming manual workaround for publishing current data. In considering next steps, we must balance our transparency commitments with ensuring that we only publish data that is robust and accurate. Within the recent publication on strategic export controls licensing, we have reduced data on LITE licensing decisions, whilst we make further long-term developments to the system. In practice this means that for a period of time, export licensing decisions made in LITE will not be included on our Strategic Export Controls: Reports and Statistics website (searchable database website), a website developed to allow users to create reports based on their own criteria, from 2023 onwards (from 1 January 2023). Our strategic export controls licensing official statistics publications will also omit some data on export licensing decisions made in LITE from 2023 onwards (from 1 January 2023). Of these LITE export licensing decisions, whilst the data for these will not be included on the searchable database, the vast majority of data for these will still be included within the official statistics, which means we will still be publishing data that provides a comprehensive overview of the export control licensing system, with the reduction being in some of the more detailed breakdowns of data included in some of the underlying data tables provided within the official statistics.

Data on export licencing decisions made in LITE prior to 2023 (up to and including 31 December 2022) are included in the strategic export controls licensing official statistics and on the searchable database website (except for SIEL end-user types and firearm quantities).

Next steps

The reductions in data on LITE licensing decisions will be a temporary situation, only for the minimum time required. During this period, we are being transparent in our approach and caveating information appropriately so that users of these products understand the impact of the transition phase on the published data. As further LITE functionality is rolled out, we will be able gradually to increase and improve the data published from LITE. This will be an iterative process, but we anticipate a return to current transparency levels by March 2025 at the latest. We will make regular incremental improvements to the service as more exporters join LITE’s private beta, ahead of an open public rollout planned from March 2024 (public beta). We will retrospectively publish all LITE data that was omitted during the transition period to ensure there are no overall reductions in transparency.

Contact ECJU

Queries in relation to the changes outlined in this notice can be sent directly to ECJU.statistics@businessandtrade.gov.uk

General queries about strategic export licensing:

Export Control Joint Unit

Department for Business and Trade
Old Admiralty Building
Admiralty Place
London
SW1A 2DY

Email exportcontrol.help@businessandtrade.gov.uk

Telephone 020 7215 4594