mailing a whistle to Great Britian from US

I would like to return a whistle to a maker in Great Britian but am real confused by the forms required. If you have done this before, can you advise me as to what forms are needed and how they need to be filled out so it won’t wind up getting stuck in customs.

Just go to the Post Office and ask for a customs form. It’s a smallish form, with a green tear-off section. You basically fill in the “to”, “from” sections plus a description of the contents and the approximate value. I’ve heard that some people use a pretty low approximate value.
Be sure to note on there that this is being returned to the maker for repairs (as opposed to your shipping new merchandise into the country). New merchandise would be subject to import tariffs which are pretty high in the UK. Ask the maker to make a similar notation on his customs slip when he sends it back to you (returned from repairs). For some reason, the wait in customs in Great Britain is often pretty long, so you and the recipient need to be patient.
If it’s a two part D whistle, it will probably fit in a small flat rate Priority Mail box which turns out to be about the most economical way to ship.

In my experience, it doesn’t make one jot of difference writing “for repair” on it - they’ll still hold it up and charge customs duties plus an exorbitant “administration charge” to release the thing. Makes you sick, it does. And for goodness sake, keep all possible documentation, including original invoice for the whistle if you have one, on the remote chance that you might be able to claim back any wrongly imposed charges later. Which, due to almost unbelievable levels of incompetence and indifference on the part of HMRC at the moment, typically takes between 6 to 9 months. And even then, they won’t refund the admin fee that you shouldn’t have had to pay in the first place.

Not that I’m bitter …

Just musing … Back when I was doing a lot of business travel in Europe, I occasionally needed quick delivery of stuff from my home office, including expensive items like laptop computers. I’d just arrange FedEx overnight delivery, and the item would arrive the next day, no customs hassles or extra fees. Which was the point of using FedEx overnight service and paying the premium.

I wonder if this is still a viable option to avoid the nightmare scenarios such as Ben describes. FedEx seemed to know how to handle the bureaucracies, or they wouldn’t have much of an overnight service. But I have no idea what the cost would be nowadays.

Yeah. I wonder how they do that? Back in the days when I had to mail things across the big pond for business purposes, FedEx always worked. And similarly coming from the States to here. Other methods/carriers not so much …

Plus, to be fair, others have told me that they have avoided hassles. But one gets coloured by ones own experiences, and I have invariably had bad ones. Jem tells me I make a fuss, and he says he only has hassles like this one in three times. For me, out of a handful of times recently, it’s been 100%.

Ben’s spot on. Customs in the UK are incredible - if you want an organisation which is intent on fleecing customers, then this has got to be it.

I got billed for returning a flute to a seller - £200, despite the custom forms being appropriately returned. The Customs fees for opening the package isn’t small either - usually up to about £12-20 last time I had a package delivered here.

If you used a signed for service, and get it insured for a nominal amount, tick ‘Other’ in the box, and explain on it that the item has no commercial value - for repair’ - some benevolent jobsworth at HMRC might let you get on with your life instead of doing a licenced Dick Turpin act on your flute :slight_smile:

Based on my experience (over the last three years or so) it depends on what postal services is used in the US how it arrives in the UK. Untracked packages seem to come in the normal Royal Mail postal delivery, sometimes after a three week delay that the postman said was due to a trip to Ireland for customs clearance.

Tracked packages have come via Parcel Force. The admin charge for customs clearance is more (last year £12 rather than £8) but the tracking system seems to work, after a fashion. Maybe I was just lucky but when HMRC made a mistake I was able to phone the local depot and find out what it actually said on the customs declaration and was given a phone number (with the warning that “it was a very busy line”) for HMRC which was answered at about the 20th attempt (no queueing system, but keep your cool, the person who answered was helpful). I quoted thier own information leaflet to them and they agreed to change the assessment. They warned me that it would take two or three days for two computer systems to release the parcel during which time the tracking information would make it look at if the parcel had made a return trip across half the UK.

YMMV but the people I spoke to were helpful and seemed to have some control over their computer systems rather than operating in the world of “it won’t let me do it”.

It’s hard to fathom these delays. Last week I sent a whistle around the world to Japan on a Monday, and it had arrived by Friday.