Adjudicator’s Office business plan: April 2024 to March 2027
Published 26 September 2024
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Adjudicator’s Office business plan April 2024 to March 2027
The Adjudicator’s Office is a public body that provides a free complaint handling service for people who are unhappy with the outcome of their complaints against HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) and the Valuation Office Agency (VOA). We are also the second tier of review for people who have made a claim under the Windrush Compensation Scheme (WCS), which is managed by the Home Office.
We are funded by these three organisations (our stakeholders), but our independence is assured through Service Level Agreements (SLA) with them.
This business plan is both a retrospective review of the previous plan and also sets out our strategic and operational direction for the next three years.
Crucial to both our past success and our longer-term ambitions is a commitment to innovation in complaint handling. Our aim is always to be the gold standard and to achieve it requires constant attention in all parts of the organisation. For example, over the last three years we have transformed in all areas of the business:
- Digital: we delivered a new case management system and telephony service. Both have helped us be more efficient and allow us to interrogate the data we collect through our casework to learn thematically from the cases and contact we receive.
- Reporting: we have developed three levels of reporting that address both quantitative and qualitative data, meaning we are better able to share the insight we receive with our stakeholders in ways that drive service improvement.
- Quality Assurance (QA): we have re-invigorated our QA approach ensuring all of our people have access to quality dashboards that shine a light on what we do well and where we can improve, which allow us to focus development activities in a cost-effective way.
- Engagement: we have prioritised working closely with our stakeholders to ensure that the learning we see is acted on by the people who can improve service at all levels within the departments we work with. This has seen multiple improvements from increased awards being made under WCS to improved information on GOV.UK to help customers better navigate a complex tax system.
The next three years will see a similar approach to driving improvement, predicated on key principles:
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Customer Impact: decisions made by government departments have consequences. Mostly, decision-making is fair, but sometimes it can feel like process is prioritised over the impact on customers. For HMRC, and the VOA, their Charters set the blueprint for great service. And the WCS sets out how people should be compensated. We will continue to ensure that those departments are held to account through objective evidence of both what works well and what needs to be improved. Using the objectives of the UK Central Government Complaint Standards – to which we subscribe – will be a key part of that drive for continuous improvement.
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Stakeholder Engagement: we have worked hard to build good relations with our stakeholders – as a critical friend helping deliver on service improvement. We have and will continue to reach out to both customer advocacy groups and the wider Ombudsman sector to ensure that our insight activities take account of all voices, and that we harness best practice. The reality for many of our customers is that there is a significant power imbalance between the resources available to a government department and the individual. By hearing all voices and acting on them, the opportunity for meaningful improvement is significantly increased.
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Transparency: an important part of the continuous improvement journey is self-reflection. There is more we can do to improve the way we interact with our customers. Over the next three years we will provide greater clarity for our customers about what they should expect from the office. This will include clear service-level expectations set out on our GOV.UK page.
This is an exciting time for us as we have the opportunity to build on the solid foundation we have established over the last few years, and we have the people in the organisation who can elevate us even further. The next three years will be characterised by adding to our successes to date and innovating year on year to ensure both we and our stakeholders provide the best service to our mutual customers we possibly can.
Our Role
Our work remains guided by our Service Level Agreements with our three key stakeholder organisations: HMRC, VOA and the WCS. We have today published an updated version of the HMRC and VOA SLA.
The core purpose of the Adjudicator and the Adjudicator’s Office is to:
- resolve complaints by providing an accessible and flexible service and make fair, trusted and impartial decisions
- support and encourage effective resolution throughout the complaints handling process whilst being responsive to customer needs
- use insight and expertise to support our stakeholders to learn from complaints and improve services to customers. In relation to HMRC and the VOA, this will be in line with their Charter commitments.
We have specifically added a reference to the Charter in the HMRC and VOA SLA for the next three-year cycle. The Charter, updated in 2020, is increasingly playing a central role in holding HMRC to account for “the service and standard of behaviour that customers should expect when interacting with [HMRC]”. We will continue to use the Charter commitments to frame the insight we provide to HMRC and VOA and drive improvements in the service to customers.
We share learning and insight with the Home Office for the WCS reviews through single case feedback and via a range of meetings with the Home Office.
Our Vision
We have updated our vision for this new business plan. The Adjudicator’s vision is to work closely with the departments to achieve the following positive outcomes:
- an efficient customer-focused complaint handling service
- high-quality, fair decisions
- insight which drives action to improve services for customers
We will have a fourth priority strand to make the Adjudicator’s Office a great place to work and support our people to deliver our vision.
Our progress since 2021
Our last three-year business plan was published in September 2021 and set out our corporate aims, grouped around four key themes of: our customers, our people, Learning from Complaints and our organisation. We have made significant progress in transforming the way we manage our casework, developing and strengthening relationships with our stakeholders and presenting and learning from the insight we receive. The examples below summarise this progress under each of the four themes:
As far as our customers are concerned, we have focused on a new approach to Quality Assurance to ensure that our casework is completed quickly but also to a high standard. We have built a system which delivers detailed QA reports which has allowed for more targeted individual learning and development for our caseworkers. We have also conducted feedback sessions with our customers and stakeholders to better understand their needs to help inform future training.
We have also built on our commitment to our people. We delivered a bespoke programme of leadership training to our senior leadership team, designed to help them meet the challenges of management. We rolled out the strengths-based assessment tool to help all our people increase self-awareness of their strengths and areas they find more challenging, which enhances collaboration. Through our Learning and Development plan we have built expertise in investigation and decision making and increased confidence in communication, as well as wider measures to embed an inclusive and supportive organisational culture.
Over the last few years, we have refined the way we capture and present Learning from Complaints to make it easier for our stakeholders to implement our recommendations and make demonstrable improvements for customers.
We have developed the way we share insight and learning through our reporting structure which has three levels. Level 1 is a self-serve report for stakeholders based on our data. Level 2 focusses on supporting stakeholders to achieve effective complaint resolution through identifying themes and trends that drive poor customer experience. In our Level 3 report we use our insight and expertise to analyse specific themes and make recommendations to improve services for customers. The reporting structure has enabled regular and focused conversations with our external stakeholders through HMRC’s Complaints Strategy Insight Board and the Customer Experience Committee on key themes that drive complaints. In turn, this has supported HMRC’s objective to use the Charter standards to drive change.
Technological transformation has been pivotal in developing our organisation over the past three years. Through refinement of our digital systems, we have improved how we analyse and categorise our cases. This means we are now able to identify learning more clearly from complaints and support better workflow management of cases through the end-to-end process. We have also installed a new call recording software allowing us to review and learn from our telephone conversations with our customers.
Our business plan objectives to March 2027
Our three-year business plan sets out our aims over the coming three years, focused on the four priority outcomes set out in our updated vision. Every year we will continue publishing an annual report setting out further detail of our deliverables for the coming year.
Our objectives to deliver our vision are as follows:
Objective One: An efficient customer-focused complaint handling service
Over the next three years we will explore how we can provide the most efficient, timely and customer-focused service to our customers and be transparent about how we are performing.
We will achieve this in the following ways:
Action 1: Resolve cases in less than four months. From July 2024 we will publish our quarterly performance against our service standard on the Adjudicator’s Office GOV.UK page.
Action 2: Improve our operational efficiency over the business plan period by:
- reducing the time taken to allocate cases to investigators
- reducing the end-to-end processing times for cases we investigate from 2023 to 2024 levels
- conducting an end-to-end review of our caseworking processes and customer journey to identify further efficiencies
- measuring our caseworking productivity and continuously consider ways to increase productivity over the three-year period
Action 3: Consider ways of making our service more personalised and customer focused by:
- ensuring we publish our service standards clearly on the Adjudicator’s Office GOV.UK page and in our communications to our customers
- reviewing our communications to customers to ensure we communicate clearly when they can expect to hear from us and the time it will take to handle their complaint
- developing our service offer so our customers and stakeholders feel meaningfully engaged throughout the investigation of their complaint
Action 4: Benchmark ourselves against the UK Central Government Complaint Standards. From this we will identify areas for further development and improvement
Objective Two: High-quality, fair decisions
A core aim of the Adjudicator’s Office is that our decisions are high-quality, impartial and fair to all parties involved. Between now and 2027, a core priority will be to continue our work to support our people to improve the quality of our complaints casework.
We will achieve this in the following ways:
Action 1: Review and update our standards and expectations for our complaints investigators and operational managers based on industry good practice.
Action 2: Publish our quality standards on the Adjudicator’s Office GOV.UK page.
Action 3: Review our quality checking and quality assurance processes to ensure they meet our caseworking quality standards and drive a culture of continuous improvement.
Action 4: Develop and improve our system of delegated authority where certain investigators have authority to make decisions on behalf of the Adjudicator.
Objective Three: Insight which drives action to improve services for customers
Key to the Adjudicator’s Office success is providing insight to our stakeholders which enables them to make improvements to the service they provide their customers. Over the period of this business plan we will build on the work to date and further enhance the products we produce, increase transparency of what we share and enhance the way we track implementation of actions.
We will achieve this in the following ways:
Action 1: Continue our three-level approach to reporting our insight to our stakeholders:
- Level 1: monthly self-serve report with key performance data.
- Level 2: quarterly thematic report structured around the HMRC Charter.
- Level 3: focusing on a discrete, cross-cutting topic.
Action 2: Publish Level 3 reports alongside our annual report
Action 3: Continue to develop beneficial partnerships and alliances with stakeholders to enhance our ability to provide insight most likely to lead to improved services for customers.
Action 4: Capture and monitor insight provided to stakeholders to maintain focus on the successful resolution of issues.
Action 5: Increase outreach to external stakeholder groups, including customer and agent representative bodies, to increase our understanding of customer experience of HMRC, VOA and the Windrush Scheme.
Objective Four: Making the Adjudicator’s Office a great place to work and support our people to deliver our vision
Our people are our greatest asset in delivering our vision. We will maintain a strong focus on developing our people to reach their full potential and to perform at their best. We will also put organisational structures in place to support delivery, decision making and effective communication.
We will achieve this in the following ways:
Action 1: Support high quality investigations by:
- developing an Investigation Skills Programme to help our teams meet expectations.
- including a programme of learning for investigators about key HMRC/ VOA/ Windrush processes and guidance to ensure all our investigators understand the framework under which our stakeholders operate.
Action 2: Attract and retain high quality investigators, managers and functional experts by:
- mapping the key skills we need in the organisation and ensure recruitment and induction plans align to future requirements.
- developing a retention plan, focusing on growing and harnessing talent.
- raising the profile of the Adjudicator’s Office by promoting and showcasing our work outside of our organisation.
Action 3: Create a positive and inclusive working environment by:
- establishing clear governance structures to ensure open and transparent decision making.
- developing our people plan to instil a culture where everyone feels they are valued and able to contribute.
- ensuring everyone has a learning & development plan to enhance skills required for their specific roles and for their contributions to the wider organisation.
Action 4: Promote positive engagement by listening, measuring and acting on how our people are feeling through the annual People Survey and monthly pulse surveys.
Our governance structures
We have strengthened our governance structures to deliver and meet our business objectives. Our vision sets our strategic direction, with all our activities agreed and tracked through two boards. Both Strategy Board and Performance Board are overseen by our Senior Leadership Team (SLT).
How we are organised
The Adjudicator
Helen Megarry left the Adjudicator’s Office on 31 March 2023. Paul Douglas was appointed as interim Adjudicator in April 2023 until September 2023 when Mike McMahon was appointed as the permanent Adjudicator.