Introduction
The key source of information about regional trade in goods is a quarterly statistical release from HMRC. It provides detailed information about the value of exports and imports of goods from and to the 12 ITL1 areas within the UK. The North East ITL1 area includes the North East and Tees Valley Mayoral Combined Authority areas.
Almost 10% of the total value of UK exports is unallocated to a specific region. Therefore, national comparisons in this report are with the England total, which is a sum of the regional subtotals.
The release includes information about the values of exports and imports by commodity and about the markets and sources of the goods across the world. Some of the quarterly trends are complicated by one-off, high value trading, so HMRC presents a lot of the information as four quarter totals in the release.
Even four quarter totals for individual markets and commodities show volatility over time, so the charts on this page include some aggregations of both. For further analysis, the HMRC site includes a tool that allows users to produce a customised regional trade data table.
The latest release included trade up to and including the fourth quarter of 2024 and was released in March 2025. The next release will include the first information about trade in goods in 2025 and is due to be published in June.