Corporate report

Part 1: our customer service and policy work

Published 31 January 2020

How our customer service and policy work complies with section 149 of the Equality Act

The Customer Impacts and Equalities team in HMRC continues to work with a wide range of internal and external stakeholders, helping the department to comply with equality legislation, provide the best possible service for people in protected equality groups and drive forward improvements in customer service.

We continue to run the Additional Needs Working Group, which meets 3 times in the year. This involves a number of external stakeholder groups who help us to identify and address issues faced by disabled customers accessing HMRC services, by customers who need extra help and also those with mental health conditions.

Most of our customers use our services without any problems, but we recognise that mistakes do happen and we continually examine our processes to identify how we can improve. We do this by listening to our customers and acting on their feedback, improving our complaints handling service and making the complaints process easy and accessible.

For 2018 to 2019, we received 71,638 new complaints, down 7.5% compared to 2017 to 2018. We resolved 98.8% complaints internally, unchanged from 2017 to 2018 and 305 complaints were upheld by the Adjudicator’s Office, down 21.6% compared to 2017 to 2018.

We have continued to monitor customer complaints involving the protected characteristics and to use the analysis and information to improve customer service. In 2018, we identified a trend of complaints from customers in vulnerable circumstances who needed extra help to deal with their tax affairs.

We reviewed and audited our guidance, processes and training for customer-facing staff to help ensure that we identify and provide an appropriate level of support for all customers who show signs of stress or anxiety, or who need extra help or time to deal with their affairs.

We have continued to work in partnership with the Royal Association for the Deaf to offer British Sign Language (BSL) translation services, which enable HMRC to hold live conversations with deaf customers who use BSL and increased the number of subtitled BSL videos for HMRC’s YouTube channel.

HMRC has a strategic approach to raising awareness of customer equality policy among policy makers and our customer-facing colleagues. We have:

• delivered training sessions covering legislative requirements, equality impact assessments and how we provide the reasonable adjustments that our customer-facing people should offer to customers who need extra support
• developed guidance for supporting customers who need extra help, and customers with mental health conditions and promoted these at a number of training events
• promoted HMRC’s Charter, which sets out what customers can expect from us and what we expect from customers

Our equality objectives for 2016 to 2020 reflect our immediate and longer-term priorities around customer understanding, digital services and customer service.

HMRC’s Diversity and Inclusion Strategy 2016 to 2020 is built around 4 themes: representation, inclusion, capability and customers. It guides the work we do to help maximise the performance of all our people, and in doing so, enables us to respond more effectively to the needs of our diverse customer base.

Your Charter

Your Charter sets out what our customers can expect from us – and what we expect from them – as we transform our services and ways of working. Work is ongoing to look at how we can refresh the Charter and embed it across HMRC ensuring that the focus remains on Charter commitments in our day-to-day work and when designing our processes and services.

The responsibility for monitoring HMRC’s performance against the customer rights set out in Your Charter and assessing how we help customers meet their obligations sits with a newly formed sub-committee of the HMRC board, the Customer Experience Committee.

Our progress is reported in Your Charter – annual reports. The 2018 to 2019 report describes the previous Charter Committee’s activities and highlights the priorities for the Customer Experience Committee. It shares the latest HMRC customer survey results, which gather regular feedback against Your Charter commitments.

The role of the new Customer Experience Committee

HMRC has recruited 5 new independent advisers, drawn from the private sector for their customer experience expertise, to sit on the Customer Experience Committee (CEC). They have been joined by 3 of HMRC’s Non-Executive Directors.

The CEC is a sub-committee of the HMRC board. It supports and provides challenge to the Executive Committee on customer experience-related issues, helping the department to deliver on its strategic objectives. The role of the committee is solely to provide counsel, scrutiny and challenge. It does not have decision-making authority. The committee meets 4 times a year, reporting to the board through its chair at HMRC board meetings and through its annual report.

This new committee has started to formulate its work programme and in 2019 to 2020 is prioritising customer focused culture, customer vulnerability and performance management.

How HMRC supports customers who need extra help

We have continued to improve customer services for our diverse customer base and transform the entire customer experience of HMRC. This includes rolling out our digital services, where we want the customer experience to be consistently excellent, while we continue to offer telephone service and face-to-face support for those customers who need it.

The Extra Support team, formerly the Needs Enhanced Support service, has continued to provide support and guidance to those who need additional help.

We offer extra support to customers for various reasons, including:

• accessibility issues
• low personal confidence
• mental health or emotional difficulties
• special educational needs
• genuine problems with their ability to interact with our tax and benefits system
• circumstances where they’re unable to interact with HMRC’s set processes or actions in the required manner or timeframe, for example, because they are in prison

We offer a range of extra support including:

• specialist help from our phone or webchat service where advisers can fast track an application or process where appropriate
• advisers who investigate a case and will call customers back over more complex queries
• face-to-face help at a convenient time and location or customer’s home
• debt management support
• holding 3-way conversations with the customer helped by people working for the Royal Association for Deaf people (RAD) using Skype for those with hearing impairments
• large print and Braille correspondence for customers with visual impairments
• a tailored accessible service suitable for various needs on the Additional Needs page on GOV.UK

We are continuing to upskill our advisers and expand their capability so we can resolve more complex queries in a ‘once and done’ way and ensure customers get their tax and payments affairs right first time.

We have continued to expand the service to help customers with a broader range of queries – a process that commenced in 2017 to 2018 when we started to include National Insurance Contributions queries. During 2018 to 2019 we have added queries from the Employers Helpline, Payment Enquiries Line, Construction Industry Scheme, Corporation Tax and Inheritance Tax to our remit. We plan to start referrals to the Extra Support team from our general online service helpline in the near future.

We have been reviewing our customer correspondence to ensure it is easy for customers to understand their rights and also what support is available, should they need extra help.

We also updated our general compliance factsheet in March 2019 – moving the extra help available to the start and clearly setting out customers’ rights to be represented or have someone act on their behalf. We have received favourable feedback from stakeholders on this.

HMRC also liaises with other departments and organisations to give customers the most appropriate extra support service including:

• continuing to work with our voluntary sector community partners, such as Tax Aid, Tax Help for Older People, the Low Income Tax Reform Group, MIND and the Citizens Advice Bureau. In 2018 to 2019 we added the Money Advice Trust and Grace Advocacy to the list
• the Department for Work and Pensions in supporting the transition to Universal Credit and sharing information and guidance, aiming to give a more joined-up experience for customers
• local authorities for the government-funded Troubled Families programme in England, helping families with multiple problems, including crime, unemployment, mental health issues and domestic abuse
• launching a trial scheme with Rift Social Enterprise to provide support to prison inmates, helping them bring their tax affairs up-to-date and smooth their integration back into society following release

In 2018 to 2019, our Extra Support team:

• supported more than 110,000 customers
• received more than 73,000 calls from customers transferred from general helplines and the voluntary and community sector
• resolved queries from more than 21,000 customer letters
• supported more than 16,000 customers face-to-face in community venues or in their homes

Examples of customers who require extra help

Bereavement and disability

A disabled customer, who suffered from a hearing impairment and had lost her husband, who was also her main carer, was referred to the Extra Support team from the tax credits helpline. The customer was overwhelmed by the process to report the change of circumstance following her bereavement, as she had relied on her husband to deal with financial matters.

The adviser reassured the customer that she could help and completed the change over the phone with the customer and a family friend. The adviser took details of the new claim and explained she would contact her again to confirm. The adviser got back in touch as promised and helped the customer to start using the translation service between Extra Support team and the Royal Association for the Deaf.

Mental health issues and change of circumstances

A newly-single mother was referred to the Extra Support team from the National Insurance helpline. She was suffering from post-natal depression and experiencing severe financial hardship, receiving only 25% of her Maternity Allowance. Payments she had made to settle a shortfall in her National Insurance Contributions had gone missing.

Due to the customer’s health, the team allocated the case for investigation by a specialist adviser as a single-point-of-contact. The specialist contacted the Department for Work and Pensions, the missing payments were traced and the case was resolved within 2 days. As a result, the customer’s benefits were increased and her financial pressures eased.

Grant funding and engagement with the voluntary and community sectors

In 2018 to 2019, we administered the final year of a 3-year funding scheme to the voluntary and community sectors. The scheme totalled £1,670,454 and we administered 8 awards to organisations.

This funding supports our customers who need extra help, including those who are currently digitally excluded, to understand and comply with their obligations and claim their entitlements. These organisations help customers form or rebuild a positive relationship with HMRC, which enables them to engage directly with us in the future.

The scheme is administered in line with the Cabinet Office standards for grant funding, through a dedicated account management process with regular reporting milestones. HMRC does not distribute grants to devolved administrations, local government or any other local organisations, nor commercial or civil society sector organisations.

Individual Stakeholder Forum

The Individual Stakeholder Forum (ISF) is our main external consultation forum for the voluntary and community sector and other organisations representing individual customers. It helps us to make sure our actions continue to reflect our diverse customer base. Meetings feature a mix of presentations from HMRC policy and operational representatives and discussions between HMRC people and members of the forum.

The Customer Impacts and Equalities team

The Customer Impacts and Equalities team is responsible for assessing the impact on customers and equality for all change projects across HMRC and policy measures at the Budget.

The team provides advice on how to identify any customer and equality impacts and any actions that we might take to minimise any risks and impacts.

The team has also continued to engage proactively with policy colleagues to ensure that processes for the review of future policy measures are robust and fit-for-purpose and that training for tax professionals contains relevant information and guidance on customer equalities.

All projects that are submitted to the Investment Appraisal Board are required to record formally that they have fully considered any impact on external customers and reviewed all equality implications. We handle about 6 projects a month. We review all Equality Impact Assessments so that we can ensure HMRC has fully considered equality in an appropriate and proportionate way.

The team also manages the Additional Needs Working Group, consisting of a wide range of external stakeholders and senior internal colleagues. The group meets 3 times each year to provide feedback on the accessibility of HMRC’s services and assists in the drafting of HMRC’s equality objectives.

Early in 2019, the team also provided detailed advice and guidance to an interested external stakeholder group on the support we provide for transgender customers.

The Budget process

In partnership with HM Treasury, we have continued to advise ministers on measures that are included in the annual Budget cycle. We help to ensure that equality considerations and any impact on equality are taken into account, as part of the policy decision-making process.

Ahead of fiscal events, the Customer Impacts and Equalities team reviews and provides advice on identifying and mitigating any equality impacts of proposed measures, and associated submissions. The team reports on any impact on equality in Tax Information and Impact Notes, (TIINs) – which are published on GOV.UK. A total of 64 TIINs, 80 submissions and 20 Equality Impact Assessments were reviewed during the period covered by this report.

Expanding accessibility options

In 2018 to 2019, our Extra Support team continued the partnership with the RAD, which enabled us to help 740 deaf customers with their tax affairs.

Our partnership with RAD ensures that HMRC makes information and advice more accessible for deaf customers in the UK. They can contact HMRC directly via The National Registers of Communication Professionals working with Deaf and Deafblind people or British Sign Language/English interpreter using RAD’s Video Interpreting Service.

This gives instant access to registered, qualified interpreters via PC or tablet and also produces HMRC-related content on YouTube in sign language. This service is also available for customers whose first language is not English and alternative arrangements can be made for friend and family to interpret or speak on their behalf when dealing with HMRC.

Throughout 2018 to 2019, as part of a wider transformation programme, the Extra Support team added several new business areas to the services it covers, providing a more consistent service to customers who need extra help across many areas of HMRC. The following new business areas have been made available to RAD:

• National Insurance contributions
• VAT
• Corporation Tax
• Probate
• Employer helpline
• Construction Industry Scheme

Our Extra Support team continues to offer BSL interpreters to our deaf customers during face-to-face appointments at a convenient time and location at more than 300 venues across the UK. The BSL version of Tax Facts, our tax education programme for young people, is subtitled. It is also available in Welsh and our online services and guidance, in general, is accessible in Welsh.

Our Visually Impaired Media Unit has continued to meet customers’ requests for information in alternative formats. In 2018 to 2019, the unit converted almost 34,000 documents into alternative formats, which included large print, Braille, audio, and plain text on CD.

Increasing customer equality

Our initiatives include:

• funding 4,722 days giving time for our people to assist in schools, voluntary groups, charities and other good causes during 2018 to 2019. Our community volunteering programme focuses on youth employability, social mobility, tax education and digital inclusion. We celebrated 25 years of our partnership with The Prince’s Trust and we’re proud to have helped more than 38,000 young people from disadvantaged backgrounds through the programme, supporting them to develop valuable life skills and preparing them for employment
• working with Business in the Community Northern Ireland (BitC NI) to link volunteers with local digital assistance events, as well as providing volunteer support in schools on BitC NI programmes associated with improving numeracy and coding skills
• providing HMRC’s award-winning Tax Facts and Junior Tax Facts programmes of tax education for young people aged 8 to 17, facilitating early engagement with our next generation of customers and helping them understand their future responsibilities as taxpayers. The programmes have been awarded Quality Marks by Young Money and the Association of Citizenship Teaching for resources of the highest quality and educational value
• having volunteers from HMRC to deliver Tax Facts directly to young people – and it is also being used widely by teachers in primary and secondary schools and by a number of charities, including The Prince’s Trust

Improving our customer experience

The individual needs and circumstances of our customers are different and can change regularly. Some people want and need direct support from us – face-to-face, over the phone, by post or a webchat – while an increasing number simply want to go online to sort out their tax. We need to tailor our customer experience accordingly, while promoting the long-term trend towards digital interaction.

To help customers get their tax right, we’re strongly focused on joining up our services – trying to solve more queries at the first point of contact, reducing the need to pass customers between teams and doing all we can to avoid customers having to contact us more than once.

Accessibility testing

We continued to prepare for a new EU directive on accessibility. We explained the challenges we faced with an update to the international accessibility standard known as WCAG 2.1 (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) in our previous report for 2017 to 2018.

In September 2018, WCAG 2.1 regulations for public sector bodies came into force and the government requires all public sector websites and mobile apps meet the standards by the following dates:

• new content and online services by 23 September 2019
• existing content and online services by 23 September 2020
• mobile apps by 21 June 2021

All HMRC websites and mobile apps will include an accessibility statement by those dates, which detail any known accessibility issues, what support is available if needed, when HMRC has fixed them and who to contact if you have a problem or want to make a complaint.

Our digital services

The number of taxpayers is growing as more people are in work, leading to an increase in overall demand for our customer services.

We have invested in digital technology and the data, infrastructure and security that underpins it, in order to transform the digital services we offer to our customers. As a result, contact through our traditional channels has reduced as our digital service offering expands.

The number of customers using our digital tax accounts continued to grow to record highs during 2018 to 2019. At 31 March, around 19 million people had signed up for the Personal Tax Accounts since launch, and our Business Tax Accounts are used by more than 60% of all UK businesses. This year’s Self- Assessment peak was our busiest ever online, with 10.1 million online returns (93.5% of all returns).

Customers can use their accounts to renew their tax credits awards: 47% (0.9 million) of customers renewing their tax credits award did so digitally, a 4 percentage point increase on last year. They can also use it to view their tax code, check their estimated tax liability and report changes using online iForms. Of the 1.6 million iForms we received last year, we turned around 94.1% within 7 days, marginally below our 95% target.

As well as digital tax accounts, we continue to develop innovative digital customer support services. We held around 1.4 million live webchats with customers in 2018 to 2019 as an alternative to calling us and 32,000 people took part in our webinars. Our mobile tax credits payment app was used 8.3 million times in 2018 to 2019, leading to a 46% reduction in calls on this subject.

Making Tax Digital and accessibility

HMRC is committed to ensuring everyone will have access to Making Tax Digital (MTD) services, including those with accessibility needs and we have:

• set out clearly to software developers the WCAG 2.1 AA standards we expect their MTD software to meet, asking them to declare their compliance and confirm they have support that can support people who have accessibility needs or use digital assistive technologies
• published details of MTD software on the Find software that’s compatible with Making Tax Digital for VAT GOV.UK webpage, where users can search for accessible software that meets their needs –continuing to collaborate with developers and accessibility representatives to ensure the service meets accessibility needs
• kept regular contact with software developers working to improve their products through our Digital Relationship Manager network to ensure they get things right

However, we have always been clear that businesses, which genuinely cannot operate MTD, will not be required to do so. We take into account the full range of personal circumstances when considering a business for an exemption from MTD, including disability.

HMRC’s customer equality objectives 2016 to 2020

We published HMRC’s equality objectives on 12 May 2016 on GOV.UK. They provide a baseline from which we measure improvements in our performance and advance equality.

Customer equality objectives are:

1. Customer understanding: to further develop our understanding about the impact of our services on customers and identify more clearly those who need enhanced support
2. Digital services: to provide digital services that are accessible and usable by the widest possible range of customers
3. Customer service: to ensure that our public sector duty is reflected in appropriate HMRC policies, processes, projects and training

Summary of our progress against each customer equality objective

We will further develop our understanding of our customers

We have been doing this by:

• improving our understanding of our customers especially those who need extra help, by conducting research, to find out what our customers find difficult and what we can do to make matters better
• we have 2 dedicated customer labs where we work directly with our customers before new services are designed and changes are rolled out. This means we can feel, hear and see things from the customer perspective, to make sure their interactions with us are as positive as possible by being simple and efficient
• reviewing our stakeholder engagement to improve its effectiveness
• continuing to proactively seek feedback on issues faced by the customer groups represented by our external stakeholders, so that we can improve both the accessibility of HMRC services and the overall customer experience
• continuing to discuss issues in customer-facing teams to improve our understanding and raising awareness of the support available. In response to feedback, we have been developing our guidance to support our people who are engaging with customers who need extra help and customers with mental health issues
• monitoring customer complaints to identify trends, help us to understand how we can support customers who need extra help, and proactively take action where necessary to improve our processes
• developing our analysis to incorporate complaints from customers who say they are feeling vulnerable, stressed or suicidal as a result of the pressures they are under

We will provide digital services that are accessible and usable by the widest possible range of customers

We have been doing this by:

• setting a minimum accessibility standard in the published Terms of Collaboration between HMRC and Software Developers, requiring developers to ‘make sure your digital tools meet WCAG 2.0. AA as a minimum or higher’ in order to ensure that available software will be compatible with a range of assistive technology
• continuing to develop our digital services so they are as inclusive as possible, providing extra help with digital and alternative formats when these are requested
• staying in regular contact with those responsible for introducing digital services to make sure they identify and address equality issues
• working through a number of issues with stakeholders with our Additional Needs Working Group related to the provision of accessible digital services – this includes continued work with third party software developers to make sure the software that they develop is compatible with assistive technologies
• working with third party software developers to ensure that they are developing products that meet international accessibility standards
• working to make sure that MTD for Business software meets customer needs in a similar way to the existing software
• continuing to proactively address issues raised by our stakeholders about user testing and accessibility of online services

We will continue to improve customer service

We have been doing this by:

• developing and monitoring a programme of education for our people, particularly policy and frontline colleagues to help ensure they are aware of the importance of equality and understand the reasonable adjustments that they can offer customers to help them in a way that suits them best. This includes: staff seminars, workshops, online products, newsletters and improved guidance clearly signposted on our internal intranet pages
• continuing to embed equality into our policies, processes, projects and training and monitor our performance, so we can demonstrate real improvements through Public Sector Equality Duty reports
• updating HMRC’s Additional Needs page on GOV.UK to make it clearer to customers about the range of support that we can provide for those who need extra help
• increasing our engagement with key internal stakeholders across HMRC, promoting best practice, auditing and reporting our findings to help make sure that there is a useful flow of equality information and consistent approach
• continuing to develop our assisted digital support arrangements as part of our Making Tax Digital programme, reviewing all equality impact assessments that are submitted to the Investment Appraisal Board and other programme boards (approximately 6 projects each month) and the equality impacts of draft ministerial submissions
• making sure training for tax professionals contains relevant information and guidance on customer equalities

We have also continued to review performance across HMRC to make sure we are meeting our Public Sector Equality Duties and to report on this as part of HMRC’s Annual Report and Accounts

We have been reviewing our customer correspondence to ensure it is easy for customers to understand their rights and also what support is available, should they need extra help.

Go to next section: Part 2: introduction, pay gap analysis and section 1: workforce diversity data 2018 to 2019.