For some crazy reason I decided to ship some suitcases over to the UK that were ready-packed and just taking up space here, so I booked some space with an unattended luggage shipper that I suspect I may have used previously when coming back from New Zealand. I was soon faced with the newly introduced bureaucracy and expense of Brexit.
There is a Brexit Surcharge charge of 33¢ per kilo (minimum of €5.20) which is not too bad in itself but rather than just writing down “used clothes”, items have to be listed together with individual ‘resell’ value. A right pain because I wanted to just ship them off and forget about them, but instead they had to unpack them all to see what exactly was in there. The values I put down were basically complete guesses.
For extra pain you are supposed to provide a ToR1 (Transfer of Residence relief) form, obtaining which I am told involves things like sending in copy of passport and proof of both old and new addresses, otherwise the the receiver is liable to be whacked for tax & duty, presumably based on the resale value. It is supposedly possible to later reclaim any customs charges by applying for the ToR1 after the fact, but for now I am gambling on UK customs not being up-and-running and simply waiving things through.
In contrast to all this bullshit, when I shipped some stuff last year the manifest written out by the courier on pickup pretty much just had “12x plastic boxes” on it and the only signature was for a statement saying the stuff was mine.
Only good thing in all this is finding out about the new requirements now on a relatively small shipment, and not when I have the stress of a massive pack to a tight schedule. I probably should have seen it coming having heard about a lot of commercial shippers who have simply stopped moving stuff between the UK and EU completely.