Corporate report

Next steps for our workforce

Published 31 January 2020

The information in this detailed monitoring report enables us to identify areas of good practice and continue to work on those in need of improvement.

Through targeted action, we’ve increased female representation at senior levels across HMRC and through our programme of work to develop and encourage the use of smarter ways of working, we want to ensure we are inclusive and to provide opportunities for everyone to develop their skills and knowledge.

Our Diversity and Inclusion Strategy has prioritised areas where we know we need to improve as an organisation and fully aligns with the Civil Service diversity and inclusion strategy, ‘A Brilliant Civil Service’. These include supporting our disabled colleagues, promotion to mid and senior management positions for BAME and disabled colleagues and supporting those at either end of the age spectrum.

The strategy supports delivery of our key objectives by highlighting the role diversity, equality and inclusion plays in what we do. We’ve set out how our diversity, equality and inclusion aims have a clear focus on 4 strategic themes:

• representation
• inclusion
• capability
• customer equality

The strategy recognises our people have different skills, ways of thinking and working, and different knowledge and experience. It recognises the need for us to harness these differences for the benefit of our business and our customers.

We’re doing this in the context of our People Strategy, led by insight, based on our values, focused on outcomes and by placing the employee experience at the heart of our work to create and support an engaged, inclusive and empowered workforce. This will ensure we can navigate the changes and challenges we face supporting the Civil Service’s ambition to become the UK’s most diverse employer by 2020.

In February 2019, we published our Respect at Work report, an independent review into what it is like to work at HMRC. As we’ve started to deliver the recommendations of the review, we are strengthening further our commitment to diversity and inclusion in HMRC, including reviewing the way we provide reasonable adjustments for our people.

In publishing this equality report, we’re continuing to look for opportunities to improve the experience for all our people. We have worked closely with our people in a discovery project to better understand the experience of our managers and their requirements, with the aim of giving all our people a better and more equal experience.

Further discovery projects are planned, including listening to the experience of our new starters, plus the impact of race and disability on the experience of our people.

We will continue to monitor progress made in achieving our diversity and inclusion objectives in the department’s business plan and our Diversity and Inclusion Strategy and Action Plan for 2016 to 2020.

We’re also continuing our rolling programme of external diversity benchmarking and awards entries to assess our performance on workplace diversity and inclusion when compared with other UK employers.

HMRC is a member of employer diversity organisations including the Business in The Community Race for Opportunity and Opportunity Now race and gender campaigns, Business Disability Forum, the Employers Network for Equality and Inclusion (ENEI), Inclusive Employers, and Stonewall.

Our awards and benchmarking activities include:

• being placed again in ‘The Times’ Top 50 Employers for Women table and in the top 50 Employers for Race
• being ranked as one of the top 50 employers in the Social Mobility Index of 2018
• achieving level 3 of the Government’s Disability Confident Scheme and becoming a Disability Confident Leader
• achieving a Level 2 Award from the Employers for Carers (EFC), recognising HMRC as a Carer Confident Accomplished Employer