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Re: Temu Tax
Personally I think the de minimis idea is sensible.
If someone is buying an item which costs little, maybe under say £50, then the amount of VAT which could be claimed is no more than £10 assuming 20% rate applies.
To do this, you have the hassle of intercepting the transit of the item, getting someone to process the declaration to see how much tax would be due on it, then you have to get in touch with the recipient to reclaim the tax, which involves having somewhere to store the item, and the facilities and system in place to make the contact with the recipient and handle payment, then delivering it on. I suppose they can charge a handling fee for that, but there has to be a mark at which it's worth doing it. Assuming that is about an hour of someone's time at minimum wage (£12 or there abouts) since you'd need the staff to process everything anyway as well as the cost of storage and systems for smaller items the handling fee simply would account to more than the cost of the item.
I am no fan of Temu or any kind of drop shipping outlets as the product is often poor quality.
But the same principle would apply to someone like momox (similar basic idea to musicmagpie - they buy used media from people and sell it dirt cheap on places like amazon to keep it moving), where the product is genuine etc, but then they can easily work around that by blocking up shipments of items, sending it to the UK en masse and then opening it and mailing it out to get around the small packet idea. So it just encourages evasion anyway.
Quite frankly if someone is astute enough to recognise they can get something outside the UK and for less (or it's not available within the UK) than inside unless they're turning over '000s a week doing it, it's best to let it go. Anyone making more than small gains from this is likely running a business anyway so it should come under their trading obligations and not the consumer.
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