Corporate report

HMRC disability action plan: 2024 to 2027

Published 30 April 2024

Introduction

HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) is committed to ensuring that equality, diversity and inclusion is embedded throughout all our functions. As a non-devolved public authority, our policies and services apply UK-wide.

For Northern Ireland, in compliance with our obligations under Section 49A and Section 49B of the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 as amended by the Disability Discrimination (NI) Order 2006, we have produced a Disability Action Plan to demonstrate how we continue to:

• promote positive attitudes towards disabled people
• encourage participation by disabled people in public life

To ensure our Disability Action Plan is implemented effectively, we will involve and consult stakeholders where proportionate and relevant and continue to commit appropriate resources to achieving our aims. We will ensure that our colleagues and board members are aware of our Disability Action Plan and understand the commitments and obligations within it.

HMRC will provide an annual progress report on the implementation of the Disability Action Plan. A full review of the plan will be undertaken in 2027.

Section 75 of the Northern Ireland Act 1998 requires HMRC, in carrying out our functions relating to Northern Ireland, to have due regard to the need to promote equality of opportunity between people of different religious belief, political opinion, racial group, age, marital status, sexual orientation, gender, people with a disability and people without; and people with dependants and people without.

The Act also requires us to have due regard to the desirability of promoting good relations between people of different religious belief, political opinion or racial group. HMRC’s Northern Ireland Equality Scheme sets out how we do this. We report our progress annually to the Equality Commission Northern Ireland.

In England, Scotland and Wales, we publicly set out how we meet our public sector equality duties under the Equality Act 2010 on the gov.uk website and our compliance is monitored by the Equality and Human Rights Commission.

We set out what our customers can expect from us – and what we expect from them – in HMRC’s Charter. As we transform our services and ways of working, we will continue to embed the Charter across HMRC to ensure that we remain focused on our Charter commitments.

In our principles of support for customers who need extra help, we commit to signposting the extra support available in our customer guidance, communications and letters.

Our role and functions

HMRC is a non-ministerial government department and is responsible administering the tax and customs system, tax credits, child benefit and various other functions.

HMRC’s strategic objectives

HMRC has 5 strategic objectives:

• collect the right tax and pay out the right financial support
• make it easy to get tax right and hard to bend or break the rules
• maintain taxpayers’ consent through fair treatment and protect society from harm
• make HMRC a great place to work
• support wider government economic aims through a resilient, agile tax administration system

Our strategic approach

The Civil Service and HMRC has a long-standing commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion across the UK, including disabled people in Northern Ireland.

Our strategic approach uses evidence and insight to help us be an organisation that treats all customers and colleagues fairly, including disabled colleagues and customers.

Across the UK, HMRC involves and consults disabled colleagues and stakeholders in the decisions that may impact on them. We aim to go beyond the legal minimum and work collaboratively to continuously learn and improve our practices.

Customer-focused measures

1. Build services that meet the needs of customers

As noted in the HMRC Charter, we are committed to treating all customers fairly and respectfully. In line with our values of respect, professionalism and integrity we are committed to being mindful of our customers’ personal situations and providing extra support when required.

How we will do it:

We will do this by targeting training and guidance at areas within HMRC that need improvement. We will ensure that colleagues :

• have access to the reasonable adjustments policy and work on systems that recognise and allocate reasonable adjustments

We will continue to raise awareness and deliver training on equality impacting.

We will measure our progress and outcomes through monitoring colleagues’ increased awareness of the services and reasonable adjustments they can offer to support customers.

2. Building an inclusive service

We are committed to ensuring all new customer digital services and mobile apps meet Public Sector Accessibility Regulations 2018. We commit to continuing accessibility testing using in-house and automated processes to ensure compliance with Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.2).

How we will do it:

• continue to build a collaborative network of external stakeholder groups and ensure the Additional Needs Working Group (ANWG) insight is sought and shared where relevant
• broaden stakeholder representation in consultation networks, to ensure a diverse range of customer groups who might require support or adjustments are represented continue our work to build a panel of volunteer user researchers and testers for our digital services
• use the research from our internal customer immersion team to understand the impact of HMRC’s current systems on people with different disabilities

How we will measure progress and outcomes:

• engagement with our external forums to support our reporting and consultation processes
• feedback on the accessibility of our services from disabled customers
• we will ensure the panel of volunteer user researchers and testers includes a representative number of disabled customers to ensure our systems are accessible and tested by end users

3. Accountability and governance

We will ensure that the services we offer to our disabled customers are accessible and we have appropriate governance structures to improve them when they don’t meet expectations. We have an internal impacting process, where we ensure Equality Impact Assessments are undertaken within policy and process transformation projects.

How we will do it:

• ensuring support available from the Extra Support Team (EST) is clearly signposted on the various platforms of customer communications
• ensuring we deliver relevant training to frontline colleagues to raise awareness of reasonable adjustments and extra support indicators
• reviewing our customer communications to make sure they are clear and easy to understand, meeting the needs of all customers, and are available in other languages and alternative formats
• continuing the internal impacting process, where we ensure Equality Impact Assessments are undertaken within policy and business transformation projects
• actioning any improvements identified through customer feedback and complaints
• learning from monitoring and analysing customers’ feedback, and complaints from customer groups who access extra support

How we will measure progress and outcomes:

• monitoring customer satisfaction on the EST service, ensuring we maintain customer satisfaction rates over 95%
• analysis of equality-related customer complaints to identify opportunities to improve the service and support we provide our disabled customers

4. Awareness raising

We will raise awareness of the support offered by Voluntary and Community Sector (VCS) organisations to help disabled customers engage with HMRC, and encourage feedback on how this can be improved. We will also raise awareness of the principles for support and work with VCS organisations to ensure that customers know how to access extra help by signposting on multiple external platforms.

How we will do it:

• provide funding to VCS organisations through our grant funding programme, so they can provide advice and support to HMRC’s range of customers, including those in vulnerable circumstances
• work with VCS organisations to ensure we provide holistic support for customers that need it most
• encourage VCS organisations to promote the principles by providing them with information about HMRC services
• empower  VCS organisations to provide reliable, accurate advice by upskilling them

How we will measure progress and outcomes:

• feedback from grant-funded VCS on the support and information HMRC offers the VCS, and its relevance to the groups they support

Colleague-focused measures

Colleague-focused measures to promote positive attitudes towards disabled people and encourage the participation of disabled people in public life

Our objective is to create a workplace and workforce that is:

• representative – we build and maintain a diverse and inclusive workforce, reflective of the communities we serve across all grades, groups and regions 
• inclusive – our physical and digital environments are inclusive and accessible, enabling colleagues to do their best work 
• respectful – we provide a fair, kind and human culture with a strong sense of belonging and community environments where we grow, thrive and learn

Our proposed measures

1. Process and system improvement

Improve our processes and systems to ensure they are fair, accessible to and inclusive of disabled colleagues.

How it will be done:

• we will continue to use both quantitative data on colleague diversity, and qualitative insight gathered from our disabled colleagues to take an evidence-informed approach to monitoring and evaluating our policies, processes and systems. This enables us to identify and understand any unjustified disparities for disabled colleagues and the effectiveness of our improvement actions
• reviewing our end-to-end processes for workplace adjustments, recruitment and bullying, harassment and/or discrimination to identify areas for further improvements
• participating and contributing to the Civil Service Disability, Vision and Workplace Adjustments Networks to gain a broader view of HMRC’s activities to share and gain best practice from these forums
• involving disabled colleagues in designing solutions to identified issues, to ensure they meet the needs of disabled colleagues and produce fair outcomes
• continue enhancing IT systems and assistive technology to make our products and services accessible and inclusive for all staff
• implementing the actions required to maintain our Disability Confident Scheme Level 3 accreditation

2. Learning and development

Ensure high-quality, tailored learning that supports the development of talent, knowledge, and inclusive and respectful behaviours. 

How it will be done:

• designing and rolling out learning on how to recognise and supportively challenge discriminatory behaviour and language towards disabled colleagues
• monitoring and reporting disabled colleagues’ experience of learning and development through People Survey satisfaction scores to drive parity of access and satisfaction
• as part of HMRC’s strategic commitment to improve the customer experience, all staff that have regular contact with external customers are asked to complete the ‘Just Ask’ e-learning package which includes equality legislation and details of our statutory obligations and duties
• integrating disability equality and inclusion into our leadership and management learning products
• piloting a development programme for disabled colleagues who are aspiring future leaders to support one of our organisational inclusion priorities to increase diversity at senior levels

3. Accountability and governance

Develop frameworks to embed consideration of disability equality throughout all our functions across the department.

How it will be done:

• embedding systematic consideration of equality impact and the involvement of disabled people into our decision-making processes
• implementing a revised operating model for the staff disability equality network, to provide greater support and drive an evidence-based approach
• supporting colleagues to use equality data to inform decisions and drive top-down and bottom-up accountability and support evidence-based actions and impact evaluation for disability equality
• encouraging colleagues to confidentially record their disability data status in our diversity HR on-line service to accurately identify the scope, size and locations of our equality challenges and any under-representation
• reporting regular analyses of our diversity data to our most senior governance bodies to drive accountability for improvement actions
• establish a monitoring and evaluation framework to better understand how effective our improvement actions are

4. Communicating our inclusive culture

Raise awareness of our vision, where we need to improve, and our expectations of all HMRC colleagues to contribute to making HMRC a great place to work.

How it will be done:

• running regular communication campaigns to build inclusion, raise awareness of our challenges and expectations of all colleagues, encourage uptake of learning opportunities and celebrate our diversity
• visibly celebrating diversity and embedding disability equality consideration into our estates, events and communications, including for example through good practice awards
• creating opportunities for the department to listen to and understand the personal impact of inequalities on disabled people, to reduce barriers and inspire allyship. For example, through disabled colleagues sharing their personal experiences through blogs, vlogs, podcasts and focus groups
• continuous improvement of our internal platforms to ensure up to date and accurate disability equality information is available to all colleagues

Our performance indicators/intended outcomes

Representative:

• an increase in the proportion of colleagues sharing their diversity data to enable more accurate reporting
• parity of outcomes for disabled and non-disabled candidates at each stage of the recruitment and selection decisions
• an increased representation of disabled colleagues at all levels of the department that more closely reflects the proportion of disabled people in the working age population of Northern Ireland

Inclusive:

• improved experience of provision of workplace adjustments for disabled colleagues, with improvements in how easy the process is to follow and the speed with which adjustments were provided
• we maintain Disability Confident Level 3 accreditation
• reduced gaps in retention rates between disabled and non-disabled colleagues leaver rates  
• improved experience of learning and development reported by disabled colleagues  disabled colleagues report an increase in experience of genuine care of team colleagues for their wellbeing

Respectful:

• reduced experience of bullying, harassment and discrimination
• improved reporting of bullying, harassment and discrimination and increased satisfaction that appropriate action was taken to address the bullying, harassment or discrimination
• increased inclusion and fair treatment scores in our annual People Survey which measures how well disabled colleagues feel they belong, can be authentic and have a voice and are treated with respect

Proposed measures

The plan was subject to consultation and was reviewed in light of any recommendations.

We invited consultation by directly contacting relevant organisations to participate.

We offered the opportunity for consultees to respond by email, letter, survey or participate in a virtual consultation meeting.

The consultation period closed on 16 January 2024.

Consultation

A list of people who we have consulted with people who will be impacted by the customer and colleague focused measures, and those who represent, or act for, disabled people is available at Annex A. We asked for views on whether the proposed measures promote positive attitudes and encourage participation by disabled people in public life.

Although the plan relates to Northern Ireland, the measures included within the plan will be implemented on a UK-wide basis, therefore we have sought views from relevant organisations across the UK.

Internal arrangements

Within HMRC there are dedicated departments who will consider and monitor the impact of policies, develop strategies and plans to help improve the service HMRC provides to all its customers.

These consist of:

• quantitative and qualitative research
• organisational listening
• customer journey reviews
• equality impacts including Equality Impact Assessments (where appropriate)

Through collaboration with relevant departments, HMRC will monitor the impact and effectiveness of the proposed measures.

Action measures and timeframe

The 2024 to 2028 timeframe is realistic and aligns with HMRC’s wider strategic plans for an inclusive service for all its workforce and customers.

Performance indicators

The progress and effectiveness of each measure proposed as part of the Disability Action Plan will be monitored using the performance indicators. An annual progress report will be submitted to the Equality Commission Northern Ireland.

Publication

Following its submission to the Equality Commission Northern Ireland the Disability Action Plan will be published on the HMRC Equality and Diversity GOV.UK page.

For further information on the Disability Action Plan, please email disabilityactionplan@hmrc.gov.uk or write to us at:

Northern Ireland Equality Policy Adviser
HR People and Organisation Development
HM Revenue and Customs
Ground Floor
Yorke House
Castle Meadow Road
Nottingham
NG2 1BQ