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How Defra ditched legacy tech to transform UK border efficiency
A 15-year-old system was slowing down the UK border. Here’s how Defra built a modern, cloud-based replacement that automates 99% of declarations.
Managing a national border is a high-stakes balancing act: you have to keep the country secure without letting trade grind to a halt. For the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), that balance was being threatened by the Automatic Licence Verification System (ALVS). This 15-year-old legacy workhorse was designated as National Critical Infrastructure, but was showing its age. The system crashed frequently, was difficult to scale and could on occasion leave traders stranded at the border while it loaded.
Defra urgently needed a replacement for the ALVS system, and worked with Equal Experts to build the Borders and Trade Matching Service (BTMS). This is a bespoke, cloud-based engine that turned a notorious bottleneck into a streamlined, automated service. The result is that Defra has been able to retire its legacy system ahead of schedule, and secure the UK’s biosecurity for the future.
Outcomes
99.49% automation
Virtually every customs declaration now clears automatically, exceeding the 3% manual-release threshold agreed with Defra and HMRC
86% faster searching
Making data easier to find saves hundreds of hours a year for border staff
£1.7M annual savings
By giving staff access to the right data at the right time, Defra has removed costly inter-agency dependencies at major sites like Sevington
About the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs
The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) is the government agency that is in charge of the UK’s natural environment and agricultural policy. Defra manages the critical digital infrastructure that allows billions of pounds in trade to flow safely across the UK border every year.
Industry
Government
Organisation size
13,000 employees in the UK
Location
UK
Project length
Launched August 2025
Challenge
Legacy debt creating a national infrastructure crisis
Defra is responsible for matching import pre-notifications for food, plants and animal products with HMRC customs notifications. For many years, this process was done through the Automatic Licence Verification System (ALVS) but by 2025, the ALVS was old, unreliable and struggling to support current trade volumes.
In May 2024, the system famously crashed, causing major delays for fresh food and putting Defra’s reputation on the line. Border agents sometimes waited up to 30 minutes for ALVS data to load, wasting huge amounts of time and resources.
Solution
Equal Experts undertook a project, and we worked closely with Defra to understand the processes on the front lines – visiting Border Control posts to see exactly how border agents work under pressure. We then co-designed a bespoke, cloud-based application that focuses on speed and clarity. User feedback about the changes was very positive with one user saying, “It looks cleaner, easier on the eyes – to notice what’s going on, identify checks and no-matches.”
Key features of the new Border Trade Matching Service (BTMS) include:
- Bespoke architecture: built from the ground up to be 1,000x faster than ALVS in critical scenarios.
- GMR smart search: utilises a “Search by Goods Movement Record” (GMR) feature that allows staff to match a single reference number to a complete picture of a vehicle’s cargo instantly.
- User-centric iteration: swapped manual reports for self-service dashboards and redesigned search functions based on feedback from users.
Results
Within the first month, BTMS automated 99.49% of declarations. On peak weekends, manual intervention dropped to zero. By removing the reliance on HMRC staff for simple data matching, the system is on track to save £1.7 million annually at the Sevington site alone. Border agents now have a tool that has been described as both “instant” and “phenomenal”. As one user put it: “BTMS will save an awful lot of time, sometimes we can wait up to 30 minutes for ALVS to load and that can slow down operations, but BTMS is instant!”
Defra didn’t just replace a system; they have restored confidence in the UK’s ability to manage its most critical gateways.
“I worked with ALVS since its inception, and now using BTMS has been absolutely phenomenal. I love that it just works. Thank you to the whole team for the effort to get us here.”
Product Owner
, Defra