The Trade Remedies Authority (TRA) has published its decisions in three tariff rate quota (TRQ) reviews on the UK’s steel safeguard measure.
Part of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) framework, TRQs are used to help implement safeguard measures by specifying how much of a product can be imported from a country before its imports are subject to higher tariffs.
The first review concerned category 4 and category 7 steel products — aluzinc, aluminised flat steel and quarto plate. The TRA has decided to maintain the current TRQ on both categories after it found that UK industry produces steel products that compete with those in the applications, and that removing these goods from the safeguard would risk harming the UK steel industry.
The second review concerned alloy merchant bars and light sections (category 12A) and the decision has been taken to vary the TRQ by removing three of the eight commodity codes in category 12A, having found no evidence of UK production during the period of investigation for the goods subject to review in those commodity codes.
Finally, the TRA reviewed the Developing Country Exemption (DCE) status of Türkiye relating to category 4 steel products, the metallic coated sheets. Developing countries are given exceptions to TRQs if the goods imported are less than 3% of the total imports of that product and if, collectively, these low volume exports account for no more than 9% of the total imports of that product.
In this case, the TRA has recommended a country-specific quota for Türkiye as category 4 steel imports from that country exceeded the threshold during the Period of Investigation.
All three decisions come into force immediately.
