Corporate report

HMRC: Public Sector Equality Duty compliance 2023 to 2024

Published 30 July 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 2023 to 31 March 2024
• 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 2023 and March 2024:

• Contact method preference and digital appetite of HMRC customers
• Understanding ‘Unpaid Tax Agents’ and their motivations to register with HMRC

Assessing the impact of 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 2023 to 2024 we published 78 TIINs.

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.

Customer and equality analysis takes place across the department’s portfolio of projects. We have assurance that this is completed as:

• teams working on specific projects produce Equality Impact Assessments (EQIA) from the change concept stage working with people who have experience in Equalities analysis
• we have introduced Customer ‘Guardrails’ – minimum standards and expected outcomes – to provide assurance that impacts on customers are understood throughout the change process
• we have governance in place to ensure that all change projects have a completed EQIA

20 EQIAs for service delivery programmes were published between April 2023 and March 2024.

Digital Accessibility

To ensure our digital services are usable, accessible, and inclusive as possible, we conduct regular research with customers throughout the delivery process. To better enable this, our research community has created a high-level mission goal to increase the diversity, equality, and inclusion of our research panel.

We have:

• continued to research our services with users of assistive technology to enable us to better meet disabled customers’ needs, with an increased focus on using data to increase knowledge of users’ barriers
• proactively engaged disability organisations and charities to better understand our users’ needs as well as recruit more diverse participants for our research
• developed our internal research panel to identify colleagues who have declared access needs. We have also worked with the internal HMRC deaf and hard-of-hearing group to develop guidance on how to run inclusive research sessions
• developed and trialled a new mobile app-based navigation system to aid blind colleagues’ navigation around our regional centres
• developed stronger controls around the procurement of software and services for use by HMRC colleagues which consider the accessibility of the solution being procured

Customer communications and guidance

We are continually improving how we communicate with our customers, taking into account their needs through engagement with external partners. We continue to share draft standard letters with external partners, using feedback to refine our approach. This enables us to take on board external perspectives on messaging, the timing of delivery and the potential customer impacts of our communications to help ensure they land as effectively as possible.

We work in collaboration with the One-to-Many Compliance Advisory Board (OCAB) whose membership includes external organisations for represented and unrepresented taxpayers, such as the Chartered Institute of Taxation, the Association of Taxation Technicians, TaxAid and the Low Incomes Tax Reform Group. With this latter group we have been working to bring clarity to customers through the wording used in different types of messaging. We have also improved our One-to-Many Letter Writing Toolkit to support colleagues.

Alternative language services

HMRC has well-established, alternative language services and resources. We engage translators and interpreters for multiple languages, providing our customer-facing colleagues with guidance on how to access these services.

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 ‘Interpreters Live! 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.

We have a well-established Welsh language service in HMRC. Our customers can use our online services in Welsh as well as receiving Welsh language correspondence and other customer services. From April 2023 to March 2024, the Welsh Language Unit translated over 2 million words into Welsh. Our Welsh language customer service received more than:

• 20,000 phone calls
• 1,000 emails
• 7,000 pieces of post in Welsh
• £1.7 million in payments

In addition, we also had over 543,600 views of our online Welsh language services.

The Equalities Team and Welsh Language Unit have run teach-in sessions for HMRC colleagues to ensure legislative requirements for the Welsh language are understood.

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

Our Charter sets out the standards and behaviours that customers can expect from us – and it’s the basis of how we seek to earn and maintain public trust. An important way we do this is by supporting our customers when they are trying to get things right. We recognise that people have individual circumstances, and we do our best to ensure that our systems, services, and processes take this into account.

During 2023 to 2024 we continued to improve external guidance, publishing new interactive guidance products, including forms, decision trees and calculators and improving existing guidance to make it easier to find and understand.

Colleagues are continuing to develop skills to deliver the Charter, either through completion of ‘Living the Charter’ e-learning or through the ongoing application of the Compliance Professional Standards in their compliance work.

Our customer service Extra Support Team

Our Extra Support Team helps people who need extra support according to their needs, including those who are vulnerable. Types of support include:

• specialist phone or webchat service investigating, and calling customers back about, more complex queries
• support for customers in debt
• providing alternative formats for over 56,540 customers during 2023 to 2024, including large print, Braille, audio, and plain text on CD
• video appointments, to give customers the benefit of a face-to-face visit without the need for travel
• face to face appointments
• a partnership with the Samaritans to transfer vulnerable customers to them for emotional support
• upskilled colleagues with safeguarding training to support vulnerable customers
• upskilled colleagues with Autism awareness training to support neuro-diverse customers

During the year a total of 138,606 customers received support.

Providing support for customers going through compliance checks

Support for customers

Our Compliance Extra Support Team provides support for customers going through a compliance check who require extra support. The team managed 4205 customer referrals from 1 April 2023 to 31 March 2024. The team also signposts customers to specialist organisations for support and provides advice to HMRC colleagues. We have published a series of YouTube videos to help customers better understand compliance processes.

To support customers who are less digitally able we introduced an Alternative Dispute Resolution (ADR) application telephone helpline as an alternative to the online process.

Meeting our Public Sector Equality Duty

We have introduced a programme of work to assure we are meeting our Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED) obligations in our compliance work. We have developed a bite-sized learning product for compliance colleagues and updated our guidance. We have also created a PSED and Extra Support ‘masterclass’ training product, collaborating with partners from the Voluntary and Community Sector to bring protected characteristics to life for our colleagues. The Royal National Institute of Blind People (RNIB) joined live training events to describe the experiences of blind people, building colleagues’ understanding and empathy for customers who have a visual impairment.

Understanding the experience of our customers

Recognising the importance of understanding our customers’ views and experiences, we held four customer immersion sessions to gain insight on what it is like to go through a compliance check. This insight will be used to create a learning module to build empathy for, and understanding of, our customers’ experiences. We have delivered training for compliance colleagues to recognise signs of economic and emotional abuse and a robust process for reporting concerns to the appropriate authority is in now in place to support these customers.

Customer complaints

HMRC has a comprehensive customer complaints process, with customers having the opportunity to submit a complaint if they are unhappy with the service provided, for example because of poor service or unreasonable delays.

Customers can also refer complaints to the independent Adjudicator’s Office if they are not happy with our response, and the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman if they disagree with the outcome reached by the Adjudicator.

To improve our customers’ experience we aim to learn from complaints so that we prevent the same problems from re-occurring.

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

We work 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 with additional needs and our customer-focused equality objectives.

Working with VCS organisations

Besides our engagement with the sector, HMRC provides funding to some charitable organisations to extend our reach and provide support to customers who might not approach the Department directly for assistance. HMRC’s grant funding programme has been established for many years and operates in accordance with Cabinet Office grant guidelines.

In 2023 to 2024, we awarded 12 voluntary and community sector organisations a share of £5.5 million in funding to help customers with their tax affairs.

During the 2021 to 2024 programme, the funded VCS organisations helped over 119,000 customers resolve issues and meet their tax obligations through a range of channels, including telephony, email and face-to-face.

Additionally, in September 2022, Samaritans and HMRC began working together to deliver an 18-month project to extend and build on the support offered by HMRC to customers engaging with our Extra Support Teams. After the success of the initial pilot, the support package has now become business as usual, and a 3-year contract has been put in place with Samaritans after an open competition. Where needed, HMRC advisors signpost customers in vulnerable circumstances to specialist emotional support through a dedicated Samaritans helpline. Work is underway on further upskilling of key staff and expanding the learning into other customer-facing teams across Customer Service Group.

Colleague-focused activities

One of HMRC’s strategic objectives is to be a great place to work. Our equality objectives for 2020 to 2024 were to be an inclusive and respectful workplace, representative of the communities we serve. Our equality objectives support our strategic objectives and help us deliver the service for our customers that we commit to in our Charter. They also help us to meet our statutory obligations under the Equality Act 2010 and Northern Ireland Act 1998 and are aligned with the Civil Service Diversity and Inclusion Strategy: 2022 to 2025.

Our actions focus on improving processes, providing learning and development, strengthening accountability and governance, and communicating our inclusive culture.

During 2023 to 2024, we implemented departmental inclusion priorities linked to the protected characteristics as defined in the Equality Act 2010 to support and measure progress against our equality objectives, which are reviewed annually.

Equality Objectives

Inclusive

This objective focuses on organisational behaviours that make HMRC’s environment inclusive and accessible, enabling colleagues to do their best work. Our evidence-based departmental priority was to improve engagement, wellbeing, and retention of all disabled colleagues.

Respectful

This objective focuses on the behaviours and actions of colleagues, enabling a fair, kind and human culture with a strong sense of belonging and community environments where we grow, thrive and learn. Our departmental priority was to address bullying, harassment and discrimination (BHD), especially for diversity groups that experience higher levels of bullying.

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. Our departmental priority was to increase diversity at Senior Civil Servant (SCS), Grade 6 and Grade 7 levels.

Our strategic approach

We take an evidence-based approach to equality, diversity and inclusion. We analyse diversity data to identify our biggest equality challenges. We look at historical data for the last five years and use predictive analysis to see what’s likely to happen if we keep doing what we’re doing now. We look for disparities between employee experience or outcome based on equality characteristics. For example, we analyse recruitment data to check for potential inequalities at applicant, sift and appointment stages. We use this information to improve our processes and monitor the impact of our interventions.

We also take government people priorities, and feedback from colleagues and trade unions, into account. We agree our statutory reports and priorities annually with HMRC’s Executive Committee. Responsibility for monitoring progress twice annually is delegated to our Workforce and Workplace Steering Group, which comprises senior leaders from across the department.

In 2023 to 2024 we:

• embedded our approach to equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) by implementing new organisational infrastructure and ways of working, which focused on the need for everyday inclusion and providing assurance that all our inclusion activities are as effective and efficient as possible

• established an annual cycle for reviewing and refreshing our evidence-based inclusion priorities and success measures, which are benchmarked against UK working-age population statistics and Civil Service-wide data, to drive, monitor, and evaluate our progress

• supported colleagues through our IT Accessibility Centre of Excellence that performs robust Accessibility tests on all HMRC internal services, testing against Web Content Accessibility Guidelines

• developed and continued to upskill a diverse pool of Decision Managers. These are colleagues from all lines of business who are responsible for making independent, objective and evidence-based decisions on our most complex formal HR processes including Bullying, Harassment and Discrimination, ensuring it represents the diverse population of HMRC’s workforce

• continued to communicate our inclusive culture in HMRC and supported communities across HMRC to celebrate equality, diversity and inclusion. Our communications have raised awareness of the organisation’s approach to EDI and our collective roles in delivering on our equality objectives and responsibilities

• embarked on a transformation of HMRC’s recruitment policy to provide managers with the tools to attract talent from an even wider range of diverse backgrounds

• in addition to routine flexibility in when, how and where colleagues work, opportunities across the UK, Workplace Adjustment Passports, and a Carer’s Passport, we maintained a pool of independent panellists to increase the fairness of recruitment selection decisions, advertised all internal temporary promotion opportunities for ‘expressions of interest’ (EOI) across a civil service jobs platform to widen access

• maintained a legally compliant employment framework by implementing UK legislative changes, including Equality Act 2010 (Amendments) 2023, Carers Leave Act 2023, The Employment Relations (Flexible Working) Act 2023 and Paternity Leave (Amendment) Regulations 2024

Annex: Declaration and representation

We ask colleagues to record their diversity characteristics voluntarily and confidentially in our online HR system and are aiming to achieve an 85% declaration rate for each characteristic. This includes information on all equality characteristics and additional diversity characteristics such as carer status and socio-economic background. Diversity data is considered personal data under the UK General Data Protection Regulations (UK GDPR). It is anonymised and aggregated before it is used to monitor employee experience and outcomes. Any data that could potentially identify an individual is suppressed.

The following tables show HMRC’s workforce representation and declaration rates by equality protected characteristic by grade, as of March 2024.

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. Percentages exclude those with an unknown status and those that have elected not to declare in that characteristic.

The Disability declaration rate is the proportion of all colleagues who have made a declaration.

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

All tables are rounded to the nearest %.

Table A: Representation and declaration rates – disability

Grade	Disabled	Non-disabled	Chose not to declare	Not known	Known disabled	Disability declaration
HMRC overall	10%	60%	5%	25%	14.1%	75%
Senior Civil Service	7%	78%	4%	10%	8.2%	90%
Grade 6	9%	73%	6%	13%	10.9%	87%
Grade 7	10%	68%	6%	16%	13.2%	84%
Senior Officer	10%	67%	5%	18%	12.9%	82%
Higher Officer	10%	62%	5%	23%	13.6%	77%
Officer	9%	59%	5%	27%	13.7%	73%
Administrative Officer	10%	51%	4%	35%	16.6%	65%
Administrative Assistant	15%	47%	5%	33%	24.0%	67%

Table B: Representation and declaration rates – ethnicity

Grade	Ethnic minority	White	Chose not to declare	Not known	Known ethnic minority	Ethnicity declaration
HMRC overall	15%	63%	3%	19%	19.0%	81%
Senior Civil Service	8%	79%	4%	9%	9.6%	91%
Grade 6	10%	76%	5%	9%	11.1%	91%
Grade 7	12%	72%	4%	11%	14.7%	89%
Senior Officer	13%	70%	4%	12%	15.6%	88%
Higher Officer	16%	63%	4%	17%	20.8%	83%
Officer	16%	60%	3%	21%	21.0%	79%
Administrative Officer	15%	55%	2%	28%	21.4%	72%
Administrative Assistant	5%	68%	4%	23%	7.4%	77%

Table C: Representation and declaration rates – sexual orientation

Grade	Lesbian, gay, bisexual and ‘other’ (note 1)	Heterosexual	Chose not to declare	Not known	Sexual orientation declaration
HMRC overall	5%	61%	7%	28%	73%
Senior Civil Service	6%	75%	7%	12%	88%
Grade 6	4%	74%	8%	14%	86%
Grade 7	5%	70%	8%	17%	83%
Senior Officer	4%	69%	8%	19%	81%
Higher Officer	5%	64%	7%	24%	76%
Officer	5%	60%	6%	29%	71%
Administrative Officer	4%	51%	6%	39%	61%
Administrative Assistant	2%	44%	7%	47%	53%

Note 1: ‘Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Other’ includes people who categorised their sexual orientation as gay man, gay woman/lesbian, bisexual or ‘other’.

Table D: Representation and declaration rates – religion or belief

Grade	Declared religion	No religion or belief	Chose not to declare	Not assigned	Religion or belief declaration rate
HMRC overall	36%	25%	7%	31%	69%
Senior Civil Service	40%	37%	8%	15%	85%
Grade 6	42%	32%	9%	18%	82%
Grade 7	39%	32%	9%	20%	80%
Senior Officer	40%	28%	8%	23%	77%
Higher Officer	37%	27%	8%	28%	72%
Officer	35%	25%	7%	33%	67%
Administrative Officer	32%	19%	6%	43%	57%
Administrative Assistant	32%	9%	5%	54%	46%

Table E: Representation – sex

Data on sex is recorded at the point of employment for all colleagues, so the declaration rate is 100%.

Grade	Female	Male
HMRC overall	52%	48%
Senior Civil Service	46%	54%
Grade 6	44%	56%
Grade 7	46%	54%
Senior Officer	50%	50%
Higher Officer	49%	51%
Officer	53%	47%
Administrative Officer	58%	42%
Administrative Assistant	66%	34%