Corporate report

HMRC Public Sector Equality Duty compliance 2022 to 2023

Published 29 January 2024

About this report

The information in this report is required by Regulation 2 of the Equality Act Specific Duty Regulations (SI 2011/2260). It:

• shows how the department complies with the Public Sector Equality Duty in section 149 of the Equality Act 2010
• covers the period 1 April 2022 to 31 March 2023
• summarises our progress against our equality objectives for 2020 to 2024

HMRC’s equality objectives 2020 to 2024 and action plan

See HMRC’s equality objectives 2020 to 2024 and action plan.

Customer-focused activities

Customer-focused activities that show progress against our equality objectives:

Objective 1: Inclusive

We aim to be an inclusive organisation and consider the needs of customers in all that we do. We are taking action in the following areas:

• research and insight
• assessing the impact of our policies and projects
• digital accessibility
• customer communications and guidance
• alternative language services

Research and Insight

HMRC commissioned and published the following research between April 2022 and March 2023:

• Understanding the experience of customers who need extra help when accessing tax support from voluntary and community sector organisations
• Taxpayer experience of the HMRC repayments process
• Understanding customer notification of qualifying disability benefits in tax credits

You can find more details about our research programmes on GOV.UK.

Our Knowledge, Analysis and Intelligence data team lead on assessing protected characteristic information, and support policy and change projects with data and evidence. This allows us to improve the understanding of the impacts our decisions, policies and procedures have on our customers.

Assessing the effects of and designing our policies and projects

To ensure we consider the effects of new policies on customers, HMRC undertakes customer and equality impacting analysis for all new policies and publishes tax information and impact notes (TIINs). In 2022 to 2023 we published 116 TIINs.

We also complete and publish Equality Impact Assessments. These ensure that, when we build new services and make changes to existing systems, they are designed to meet customer needs and delivered to enhance the customer experience. To meet our obligations under our Northern Ireland Equality Scheme during 2022 to 2023, we’ve published 25 Equality Impact Assessments for service delivery programmes.

Digital Inclusion

To ensure HMRC customers are supported we have developed a Digital Inclusion Strategy that aims to:

• mitigate the barriers to digital inclusion to enable our customers to access and use services
• ensure support is available to meet the needs of assisted digital customers via both HMRC and the Voluntary and Community Sector
• make clear what provision will be in place for digitally excluded customers

Our approach to digital inclusion is centred on designing inclusive and easy to access digital services which will increase the use of self-serve online services by digitally capable customers.

For customers who are unable to access and use our online services (digitally excluded customers), HMRC will always provide a service to meet their needs. We also regularly test our existing services, including our online services and mobile app, and review their compliance to the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations (2018).

We will continue to offer support through non-digital channels, for example telephony, including our extra support services.

To ensure our online services are as accessible and inclusive as possible, we conduct regular research with customers throughout the delivery process.

We have:

• worked with external partner Delta Alpha Psi to identify what points in the research process can exclude users
• audited our research tools so we understand who might be excluded from using certain software
• created visual guides to support customers navigating and accessing HMRC research labs
• reviewed the language we currently use on our internal accessibility screener questions
• audited our internal research panel to identify colleagues who have declared access needs

This has significantly increased the number and diversity of participants we can access for research.

Alternative language services

As an inclusive and representative organisation, HMRC has well-established, alternative language services and resources.

We engage translators and interpreters for multiple languages providing our customer-facing colleagues guidance on how to access these services.

Pre-booked British Sign Language (BSL) interpreters are provided by ‘Big Word’ and can be accessed by customer-facing colleagues, or through the Extra Support Team, who will arrange a convenient date and time to contact the customer to discuss their query or to provide additional support.

Customers can also contact HMRC using a BSL video interpreter from the InterpretersLive! service.

Where possible, we encourage customers with language translation needs to ask a family member or friend to support them when they contact HMRC, as part of the Trusted Helper Scheme.

This year, we’ve also developed more online options in Welsh. This means Welsh language customers can access these services in their language of choice.

Objective 2: Respectful

We are taking action to ensure that we always treat our customers with respect. We have made progress on:

• embedding HMRC’s Charter
• our customer service Extra Support Team
• providing support for customers going through compliance checks
• customer complaints

Embedding HMRC’s Charter

In 2022 to 2023, we continued to embed HMRC’s Charter standards in the following ways:

• we improved professional standards in our compliance activities, so that compliance managers and their teams have the right skills to deliver the Charter standards

• we focused on improving our operational processes and guidance

• we published new guidance on GOV.UK to ensure customers are aware of the extra help that’s available to them

• we worked with our funded voluntary and community organisations to understand the needs of unrepresented customers and strengthen the signposting to these organisations

We publish the HMRC Charter annual report to show how HMRC has demonstrated the standards of behaviour and values included in the HMRC Charter.

Our customer service Extra Support Team

This team has continued to provide support and guidance to those who need extra help. This includes customers in vulnerable circumstances and the service helps people according to their needs.

In 2022 to 2023, the Extra Support Team supported over 98,000 customers.

Providing support for customers going through compliance checks

• Improved guidance for customers going through a compliance check:

External customer groups and professional bodies told us that our customers found the process of resolving a dispute with HMRC confusing and that they wanted simple, accessible guidance on the options available.

Acting on that insight we collaborated with members of the Compliance Reform Forum to co-create a further series of YouTube videos that explain the process and options. The series now consists of 9 videos.

We also worked with external partners to promote the videos, including the Voluntary and Community Sector, to ensure they are accessible to as many customers as possible.

• Improved processes:

In April 2022, we introduced a new process for compliance customers moving to Debt Management after a compliance check; ensuring early, considerate conversations on payment options take place to reduce customer concerns and take account of our customers wider situation.

We also introduced an enhanced adult safeguarding process for extra support customers, with a clear escalation route to dedicated safeguarding specialists. This ensures we support customers who may be facing the risk of abuse or harm and allows us to quickly escalate the case to HMRC’s Sensitive Intelligence Unit. This unit provides an advisory service to ensure all aspects of the customer’s situation are considered and, where appropriate, makes referrals to external partners.

During the year we enhanced our mandatory extra support learning to ensure colleagues understand:

• how to recognise that a customer may need extra support
• what reasonable adjustments can be put in place
• the role of the Customer Compliance Group (CCG) Extra Support Team

Objective 3: Representative

We will be a representative organisation by:

• working with external stakeholders and customers
• working with Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) organisations

Working with external stakeholders and customers

A vital part of our work is to be both inclusive and representative. We include external stakeholders in every aspect of our service delivery working with over 100 stakeholder groups, to:

• build supportive, trusting, and professional relationships
• ensure that we apply their knowledge and expertise across HMRC to drive continuous improvement

HMRC is very grateful for the continued support from all our stakeholders.

The Individual Stakeholder Forum

The Individual Stakeholder Forum is our main external consultation forum for the VCS organisations that represent individual customers. They help us to understand our diverse customer base. Meetings feature a mix of presentations from HMRC policy and operational colleagues and discussions on topical issues, changes in policy or process, or topics raised by members.

The Additional Needs Working Group

The Additional Needs Working Group (ANWG) supports and challenges planned changes to ensure that we consider any impacts on customers with additional needs. It also provides HMRC with a forum to constructively exchange ideas about the requirements and concerns of customers who need additional support and our customer-focused equality objectives.

Working with Voluntary and Community Sector organisations

HMRC provides funding to some charitable organisations to ensure our customers are supported by those organisations, when needed. HMRC runs a competition for grant funding, with the latest competition in 2021 funding 12 organisations over 3 years (2021 to 2024) with funds totalling £4.98 million. We continue to work closely with these organisations to help reach customers who need support and extra help with HMRC’s services.

In 2022 to 2023, the funded VCS organisations helped almost 40,000 customers across a range of channels, including telephony, email and face-to-face.

In September 2022, Samaritans and HMRC began working together to deliver an 18-month project to improve the emotional support offered by HMRC to its customers engaging with extra support teams. Where needed, advisors will be able to signpost any customers in vulnerable circumstances to specialist emotional support through a dedicated Samaritans helpline, initially run as a pilot.

Colleague-focused activities

HMRC’s statutory equality obligations apply to both our customer-facing and colleague-facing functions. Our equality objectives for 2020 to 2024 are an inclusive and respectful workplace, representative of the communities we serve. We meet these objectives through improving processes, providing learning and development, strengthening accountability and governance for equality, and by communicating our inclusive culture.

Our colleague-focused equality actions support HMRC’s strategic objectives and are aligned with the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy: 2022 to 2025.

Our strategic approach

In 2022 to 2023, working with key stakeholders, we:

• streamlined our approach to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) by aligning our statutory and strategic EDI objectives and embedding work previously carried out by standalone programmes of work into business as usual

• co-developed a new inclusion approach which highlights the need for everyday inclusion and to work together to address our most persistent challenges more effectively

• strengthened our governance arrangements by clarifying organisational and individual responsibilities and accountabilities for EDI across the department

• developed evidence-based inclusion priorities and success measures for implementation in 2023, benchmarked against UK working age population statistics and Civil Service-wide benchmarks to drive, monitor, and evaluate our progress

• identified where upskilling and guidance on EDI is most needed

• agreed new ways of working to provide better assurance that all our inclusion activities are as effective and efficient as possible

• strengthened our governance of EDI activities; accountability rests with Executive Committee, while responsibility for monitoring progress on EDI rests with our Workforce and Workplace Steering Group, comprising senior leaders from across the department

• refined our EDI operating model; a small EDI team which provides support to key stakeholders across the department in line with the Declaration of Government Reform and the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion strategy

Inclusive

This objective focuses on organisational behaviours that make HMRC’s environment inclusive and accessible, enabling colleagues to do their best work.

During 2022 to 2023 we:

• developed a ‘Building an Inclusive Workplace’ learning product for implementation in 2023 to 2024 to ensure colleagues are aware of their legal obligations and supported to discharge them

• improved the accessibility of over 220 internal systems

• produced more than 100 Accessibility Statements in line with the Public Sector Bodies Accessibility Regulations 2018

• rolled out accessibility learning sessions to a further 1000+ staff

• revamped our online guidance and successfully migrated our intranet site to make material easier to find

• designed and hosted events such as Global Accessibility Awareness Day

• received a further 2 Inclusive Environment Recognition Certifications by the Construction Industry Council, recognising the inclusive and accessible environments of ten HRMC regional centres

• supported thousands of colleagues through our workplace and reasonable adjustments policies

• used satisfaction levels with our Workplace Adjustments data to baseline new success measures aimed at improving the retention, engagement, and wellbeing of our disabled colleagues

Respectful

This objective focuses on the behaviours and actions of individual colleagues, enabling a fair, kind and human culture with a strong sense of belonging and community environments where we grow, thrive and learn.

During 2022 to 2023 we embedded programmes of work to improve race equality and respect at work into business as usual. The programmes, which closed in 2022 to 2023, added impetus to our inclusion activities and contributed to the following improvements in People and Pulse Survey scores over the last 4 years:

Inclusion activity	Improvement percentage
Employee Engagement Index	10%
People feeling respected by others	4%
People feeling valued	11%
Inappropriate behaviour in the workplace being challenged	11%
Individual differences are respected	8%
HMRC is committed to improving Diversity and Inclusion	10%

We have incorporated the success measures from both programmes into our inclusion success measures and enhanced them, to make clear our ongoing commitment to equality. Respect for our differences is vital in becoming a great place to work and our priorities in the coming year include both reducing bullying, harassment and discrimination and improving colleague satisfaction with the action taken when it does occur.

Representative

This objective is to build and maintain a diverse and inclusive workforce, reflective of the communities we serve across all grades, groups and regions.

Declaration rates

Good quality data is important in evidence-based approaches.

We ask colleagues to voluntarily and confidentially record their diversity characteristics in our online HR system and aim to achieve an 85% declaration for each characteristic. Once anonymised and aggregated, we use colleague diversity data to monitor employee experience and outcomes.

Declaration rates are provided at Table A in the Annex.

Recruitment

In 2022 to 2023, we continued to monitor our diversity data for disparities at applicant, sift and appointment stages. We use this information to monitor the impact of interventions aimed at improving the fairness of recruitment and selection outcomes that contribute to making HMRC a diverse and inclusive employer. For example:

• to support us in becoming an employer of choice, we offer flexibility in when, how and where colleagues work, with career opportunities across the UK, Workplace Adjustment Passports and a Carer’s Passport

• we established a pool of independent panellists to increase the fairness of recruitment selection decisions

• we advertised all internal temporary promotion opportunities for ‘expressions of interest’ (EOI) across a civil service jobs platform to widen access

• these actions have contributed to positive changes including a +7.2% increase in ethnic minority applicants reaching the offer stage in 2022 to 2023 compared to the previous year

These are positive improvements, but we are not complacent. We have identified areas with insufficient progress in outcomes, and have factored them into our 2023 to 2024 priorities and new success measures.

For 2023-24 we will conduct a full evaluation of our Recruitment Hub, embedding recruitment best practice, and conduct quarterly analysis of those who are redeployed and held in the resource hub, to understand whether colleagues with particular protected characteristics experience disparities.

Accelerated Development and talent schemes

Accelerated development and talent schemes help colleagues from diverse backgrounds to build capability and confidence to progress their careers.

We have several in-house accelerated development and talent schemes to help create a diverse pipeline to senior roles. For example, our apprenticeship strategy sets a target of 39% of apprentices being from lower socio-economic backgrounds and targets for prison leavers, care leavers, and veterans to support our recruitment outreach schemes.

Broadly, the impact of these schemes is evaluated by measuring participant outcomes such as:

• an average of 21% participants were promoted twice since completing a development programme compared to 13% of unsuccessful applicants being promoted twice over the same period.
• our Stride mentoring programme supports career development of colleagues from lower socio-economic backgrounds. Since its launch in 2019:
  • over 1,200 mentees have taken part
  • 81% of mentees reported increased confidence and clearer career goals
  • 27% achieved promotion
  • 73% felt more effective in their current role

Annex 1: Declaration and representation

The following tables show HMRC’s workforce representation rates for each protected characteristic and grade, as of March 2023.

Declaration rates include colleagues that selected the ‘choose not to declare’ option.

The known representation rate reflects the proportion of colleagues identifying as having a particular diversity characteristic, as a proportion of all colleagues who have declared their diversity data in this characteristic.

We use data labels that reflect self-reported diversity characteristics, grouped together into administrative categories of employees:

• ‘ethnic minority’ includes Black, Asian, Chinese and mixed ethnic background categories
• currently, our white ethnic minority colleagues have the option to tick ‘Any other ethnic group’ or ‘White – any white background’. The former would fall under our category of ‘ethnic minority’
• ‘white’ includes any white background, including white ethnic minority colleagues if they’ve chosen this label
• ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Other’ includes people who categorised their sexual orientation as gay man, gay woman/lesbian, bisexual or ‘other’
• we use a question on ‘gender reassignment’ and a question on self-declared gender to understand the number of our trans and non-binary colleagues

Data marked with an asterisk (*) instead of a percentage has been suppressed for data protection. This indicates that the number of people in a group is less than 10.

All tables are rounded to the nearest %.

Table A: Representation and declaration rates by disability

Grade	Disabled	Non-disabled	Chose not to declare	Not known	% known disabled (Target 15%)	% Disability Declaration (Target 85%)
HMRC overall	9%	59%	5%	27%	14%	73%
Senior Civil Service	6%	78%	5%	12%	7%	88%
Grade 6	9%	72%	6%	14%	11%	87%
Grade 7	9%	68%	6%	17%	12%	83%
Senior Officer	9%	67%	5%	18%	12%	82%
Higher Officer	9%	62%	5%	24%	13%	76%
Officer	9%	58%	4%	29%	13%	71%
Administrative Officer	10%	50%	4%	36%	16%	64%
Administrative Assistant	14%	48%	5%	33%	23%	67%

Table B: Representation and declaration rates by ethnicity

Grade	Ethnic minority	White	Chose not to declare	Not known	% Known ethnic minority (Target 15%)	% Ethnicity Declaration (Target 85%)
HMRC overall	14%	62%	3%	21%	18%	79%
Senior Civil Service	8%	77%	5%	10%	10%	90%
Grade 6	9%	76%	5%	10%	10%	90%
Grade 7	12%	72%	4%	12%	14%	88%
Senior Officer	13%	70%	4%	13%	15%	87%
Higher Officer	16%	62%	4%	18%	20%	82%
Officer	15%	60%	3%	23%	20%	77%
Administrative Officer	14%	54%	2%	30%	20%	70%
Administrative Assistant	5%	68%	4%	23%	7%	77%

Table C: Representation and declaration rates by sexual orientation

Grade	Lesbian, gay, bisexual and ‘other’	Heterosexual	Chose not to declare	Not known	% Known lesbian, gay, bisexual and other (target 6%)	% Sexual Orientation Declaration (Target 85%)
HMRC overall	4%	60%	7%	29%	7%	71%
Senior Civil Service	6%	73%	7%	14%	8%	86%
Grade 6	4%	72%	8%	15%	6%	85%
Grade 7	5%	69%	8%	18%	6%	82%
Senior Officer	4%	69%	8%	20%	5%	80%
Higher Officer	5%	63%	7%	25%	7%	75%
Officer	4%	58%	6%	31%	7%	69%
Administrative Officer	4%	50%	6%	40%	7%	60%
Administrative Assistant	3%	42%	6%	49%	6%	51%

Table D: Representation and declaration rates of colleagues who care for a disabled person

Grade	Yes	No	Not known	% care for disabled person	% care for a disabled person declaration	% Sexual Orientation Declaration (Target 85%)
HMRC overall	10%	36%	55%	21%	46%	71%
Senior Civil Service	15%	51%	34%	22%	66%	86%
Grade 6	14%	44%	43%	24%	57%	85%
Grade 7	12%	42%	47%	22%	53%	82%
Senior Officer	11%	39%	50%	22%	51%	80%
Higher Officer	10%	38%	52%	21%	48%	75%
Officer	9%	35%	55%	20%	45%	69%
Administrative Officer	8%	30%	62%	21%	38%	60%
Administrative Assistant	9%	16%	76%	35%	24%	51%

Table E: Representation and declaration rates of colleagues who care for a school-aged child

Grade	Yes	No	Not known	% care for school-aged child	% care for a school-aged child declaration
HMRC overall	13%	33%	54%	28%	46%
Senior Civil Service	32%	36%	32%	47%	68%
Grade 6	24%	33%	42%	42%	58%
Grade 7	19%	36%	45%	35%	55%
Senior Officer	17%	34%	49%	34%	51%
Higher Officer	14%	35%	51%	29%	49%
Officer	11%	34%	55%	25%	45%
Administrative Officer	8%	29%	62%	22%	38%
Administrative Assistant	4%	19%	77%	18%	23%