DRAFT

Audience:

I’ve created this presentation for a series of key stakeholders within HMRC. I’ve chosen them because of the potential of them being able to provide the ‘political cover’ a solution like the one I’m going to propose would require to build evidence from the ground up.

• Jonathon Athow > Director General of Customer Strategy and Tax Design oversee’s teams that work on ‘cross cutting’ policies that impact a really broad range of citizens
• Rosie Kay > Director of Strategic Policy into Delivery as she oversees the connection between policy teams and delivery teams
• And Cerys McDonald > Director of individual Policy who oversee teams that work on the knitty gritty of policy that impacts individual customers - her teams typically get closer to the ground with research and insights

Introduction:

So, as we all know. The need for a genuinely entrepreneurial state that has the ability to create new directions and ways of doing things, while having a long-term focus and stability is essential. And with as little money to spend as ever, an ever growing list of problems and countless emerging threats on the horizon there is an appetite amongst the policy teams I work with to use different types of policy-making like mission-orientated, challenge-driven and responsible approaches to policy making.

Now, this is undoubtedly a positive thing - and i’ll get more into that later - but what this has really done however is put a lack of capability at an administrative level of government to achieve this in the spotlight.

This presentation is an analysis of HMRC’s policy making process today and the limitations of the challenge-driven efforts we are using to improve our capacity to be both agile and stable. I will go through a case study from vinnova on a mission-design frame before then proposing how we use such a framework in how we commission policy for development to improve our own capacity to be both agile and stable. I will end on some key transformations HMRC will need to undertake to embed the dynamic capabilities needed to create policy fit for the future.

Problem framing:

• But first, let’s slow down and give ourselves some context of where policy comes from.
• On paper, HMRC shares a policy partnership with HMT. Where HMT is responsible for shaping new tax policies and raising revenue, HMRC is responsible for the delivery of that policy through tax administration
• In reality, this relationship is much more fluid and between them there is not formal policy commissioning process for policies that require investigation or development.
• This is significant because when you zoom out and see the system in which this partnership exists you can quickly start to see the myriad of influences and directions policy ideas will be coming from. From ministers and the chancellor to Lobbyists like Martin Lewis. It’s an assault on the sense for policy teams who receive all sorts of requests in all sorts of formats.
• What complicates matters further is this almost deliberately opaque layer that senior civil servants exist within who see policy ideas as a currency to further their own careers. Whats important to them is the action of an idea, not the effectiveness or impact of its delivery. Ideas to some of this group are a way to further their careers, not improve citizen outcomes.
• And it’s really important to frame the system in this way because it has a profound impact on our policy-making process.
• Using this illustration from Public Digital’s report ‘Radical How’ you can see that because the policy ideas have been predicted, planned and decided upfront it results in this ‘government as a ghant chart’ policy making process where the biggest bets are made when we know the least - often not being able to test policy until 6-12 months down the line when it’s put out for consultation.
• There are hardly ever a significant mention of users in these policy memos - assuming their rationality from a purely neoclassical economics perspective and - although some will try their best to convince us otherwise - no use of a strategic framework and instead rely on planning and risk mitigation to give policy teams lists of do’s and don’t rather than strategic guard rails to behave within.

Dynamic capabiltiites