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A planned EU tax on small parcels will not stem the flood of cheap Chinese goods entering the bloc, a senior official has warned.

The spectacular growth of ecommerce companies such as Shein and Temu has swamped EU customs authorities that need to check whether the billions of parcels arriving into the bloc each year respect European safety standards and pay the right import duties.

But Brussels’ plan to abolish the “de minimis” rule, which allows goods valued under €150 to avoid customs duties, would probably have little effect on reducing the number of low-value packages entering the bloc, warned Kristian Vanderwaeren, Belgium’s top customs official.

“Today, we have a rather big problem,” he said. While the rule change would “simplify” procedures, he did not think it would have a big impact on the influx of products into Europe because the resulting increase in the final price would not be big enough, “although of course the consumer will pay more”.

In 2025, 5.8bn low-value parcels entered the EU, an increase of more than four times compared with 2022 and a 20 per cent jump on 2024 alone. Nine out of 10 came from China, according to European Commission figures.

Belgium, with a big air freight hub in Liège, is the destination for the largest volume of low-value parcels into the bloc, with 1.4bn packages inbound last year — almost a quarter of all such EU imports.

From July 1 the EU will introduce a €3 duty per type of item bought online, so that an order of three T-shirts, one pair of socks and a toy would be charged €9 in customs duties. The goal is to level the playing field with products made in Europe.

A separate EU “handling fee” of €2 per parcel will be applied from November after some countries including Italy and Romania started to apply their own national levies, leading to a redirection of small parcels.

The EU’s move follows the US’s decision last year to abolish its $800 de minimis threshold, which has rerouted a portion of Chinese exports to Europe, according to Vanderwaeren.

“If you see the amounts increasing, for me, it has to do with the election of [US President Donald] Trump, where at a certain moment the Chinese were afraid that they would not have the possibility to import their products in the United States anymore,” he said. “And therefore they are looking at other markets and Europe has been a very good market.”

At Belgium’s Liège airport, where most of the packages arriving into the country are processed, customs officers who face 3.8mn declarations a day for Belgium alone only have capacity to perform physical checks on less than 1 per cent of parcels.

They find almost a third of the goods checked are unsafe or counterfeit, or the import declarations do not match the parcel’s contents. Another common problem is parcels marked with a fake country of origin or a lower economic value to pay lower customs duties.

The new €3 tax is part of a wider reform of EU customs under negotiation between member states and set to enter into force in 2028. This should digitise the bloc’s customs under a central agency and data hub and simplify procedures for traders but also give authorities stronger tools and data to monitor imports.

However, customs experts have warned a loophole in the rules that will allow importers to avoid applying the €3 duty if they fill in a lengthier customs declaration could create additional problems.

Walter Van Der Meiren, a European customs industry expert, said: “That would shift shipments into more complex customs declarations which, for many product categories such as books, pharmaceuticals and software media, do not generate import duties anyway.”

“This puts additional strain on national customs IT systems that are already operating at capacity, while not realising the anticipated revenue.”

Officials said the European Commission is working on finalising the rules to avoid such distortions.

Shein and Temu declined to comment.