Press releases

Brussels, 27 August 2025 - CLECAT, the European Association of Freight forwarders, Logistics Service Providers and Customs Agents has urged the European Commission to grant a non-enforcement period from the 1 September implementation of ICS2 Rlease 3 for road and rail transport, warning of serious blockages at European land borders.

ICS2 is the EU’s customs risk analysis system requiring carriers to submit details of goods entering the EU before arrival. From 1 September 2025, no cargo can enter the EU unless advance safety and security data has been submitted. While the rollout of ICS2 for air and maritime carriers has already been completed, road and rail operators face significant challenges.

Until now, the majority of road and rail carriers have provided safety and security data via NCTS – the New Computerised Transit System, widely used in land transport. Under the new legislation, this data must be sent directly to ICS2. To avoid duplicate submissions, an update known as NCTS6 should automatically transfer data from NCTS to ICS2. However, with many Member States not expected to deploy NCTS6 before 2026, carriers risk being forced to file the same data multiple times.

For example, a truck travelling from Turkey to Germany via Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia and Hungary currently files one NCTS declaration at departure. From 1 September, without NCTS6, the driver must also file ICS2 declarations upon first entry into the EU in Greece and again when re-entering in Hungary.

The misalignment between ICS2 and NCTS6 rollouts, combined with frequent ICS2 outages and the high number of filings already processed from air and maritime carriers, creates serious risks. Land borders, unlike seaports and airports, have far more limited physical capacity and can be congested by just a few delayed trucks. Practical challenges unique to road and rail, such as split loads, the prevalence of small carriers, and the need for a multitude of non-EU operators to register in EU systems, were clearly overlooked when assigning the same deployment timeline to all modes of transport.

CLECAT and other European trade associations, warned of these risks months ago. On 30 May, they jointly called for a postponement of the ICS2 Road and Rail rollout. The Commission, citing legal constraints, instead asked Member States to request individual derogations by  25 August.

In response, CLECAT and others in a joint letter urged Member States for coordinated applications to avoid further fragmentation. However, this was not possible as some Member States such as Bulgaria and Estonia, already operating NCTS6 (such as Bulgaria and Estonia) could not request derogations; others with no external borders considered themselves unaffected, or applied different interpretations, such as the Netherlands treating lorries arriving by ferry as maritime traffic.

The latest Commission communication on 22 August listed updates on derogation requests from only 12 of the 27 Member States, together with short guidance on how to deal with the patchwork of readiness. However, operators across Europe report this information is inadequate to ensure compliance by 1 September, raising fears of major disruption at land borders.

With just days to go, it is clear neither trade, nor authorities are prepared for this next phase of ICS2. Furthermore, the implementation of multiple filing for rail and road should be ensured at the earliest point in time, to end discrimination of economic operators using rail and road transportation services or multi-modal transport, as current full ENS filings do not meet the operational requirements of LTL and groupage transports, nor are rail operators capable to receive and process house level filings

CLECAT has written to the European Commission in a final call to provide clarity and supply chain security by announcing an official six-month non-enforcement period, as was granted to the air and maritime sectors under ICS2. Although such a grace period was promised for road and rail, the Commission’s latest statement not only fails to mention it; but explicitly rules out business continuity procedures and alternative filing methods after 1 September in countries without a derogation. The European Commission should act without delay and announce a six-month grace period at EU level to avoid fragmentation, ensure legal certainty and prevent disruption to European supply chains.

For more information:

Ms Nicolette van der Jagt
Director General
nicolettevdjagt@clecat.org