You asked
I'm looking for the value of UK imports by commodity code. I've looked at the "IMPORTS: UK Trade in Goods by industry, country and commodity, 2008-2017" spreadsheet which is rather heavily redacted. It gives totals by sector but not by commodity code. Can you provide the totals by commodity code for 2015, 2016 and later years if available?
As a supplement to the request above I'd like to see the value of imports of each commodity by sector for the years in question.
We said
Thank you for your query regarding the Total UK imports by commodity code.
We are unable to publish data at a lower/unredacted basis, as this is considered personal information under the Statistics and Registration Service Act 2007 (SRSA). Section 39 of the SRSA renders it an offence to disclose information held by the Statistics Board that would identify an individual or a body corporate. This prevents us from publishing statistics in which individual businesses can be identified. Because the disclosure of this information is prohibited by law, we find that Section 44 of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 (FOIA) applies. Section 44 is an absolute exemption and no consideration of the public interest test needs to be applied.
The dataset that may be of help to you is our country by commodity dataset for both exports and imports. This is the lowest level that we publish at and you can select 'W1 Whole world' in the country column which will give you the totals of the commodities.
Alternatively, you could use the HMRC Build your own table tool as they publish trade statistics at a lower level. However, please note that ONS and HMRC data are produced on a different basis, so I would advise against making comparisons. HMRC data is useful in that it captures trade across borders, whereas the ONS statistics are on a balance of payments basis and captures trade by change of ownership in accordance with international standards and allows for international comparison.