The challenge

Pressure on the government to address growing environmental concerns around plastic packaging increased following David Attenborough's “Blue Earth” programme.

Following a Call for Evidence early in 2018, the government tasked HM Treasury and HMRC to work alongside Defra and the Environment Agency to investigate the challenges of plastics pollution, UK manufacturing behaviour, and waste material recovery to the UK.

Policy Lab joined the project to support HMRC and its cross-government policy partners to understand the problem, help develop policy options and explore their feasibility.

My involvement

• I supported my user research colleague in developing a research scope, making site visits across businesses within the UK plastics supply chain, co-analysing and synthesising data, and mapping user needs and creating personas.

• Visualised and modelled 'as is' business models, material, financial and data flows, and interactions with government departments across UK supply chains.

• Designed and facilitating working sessions to co-design and evaluate 'to be' journeys with various internal Teams, including HMRC, HM Treasury Policy, Defra and Environment Agency, delivery, Policy-Driven Change, Compliance and Technical Architecture.

Outcomes

• An initial concept and design for the service reflecting the policy intent, needs of UK manufacturers, and HMRC technical capabilities.

• The use of service design outputs in communicating the policy context and concepts to the minister and in external public consultation documents.

• The development of a policy option announced by the Chancellor in the 2018 Autumn Budget.

• A service design, which passed an internal discovery assessment, was incrementally and smoothly handed over to the HMRC delivery team tasked with developing the service.

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The challenge

Passported benefits is a cross-cutting policy area that focuses on enabling and supporting Scottish Child Disability Payment and Adult Disability Payment clients to access and apply for benefits awarded by other government departments that currently recognise DWP's Disability Allowance for Children and Personal Independence Payment as qualifying criteria. The project involved:

• Working across Scottish Government teams, DWP, HMRC, DVLA and Scottish Local Authorities policy and delivery teams.

• Reflecting client needs, the gradual implementation of data sharing agreements between government departments, the development of digital capacity in Scotland and other departments, and the evolving policy decisions that other government departments are establishing to recognise and accommodate Scotland's new devolved benefits. 

My involvement

As a senior service designer within the agile delivery team, I was responsible for:

• Leading the service design on Passported benefits.

• Collaborating closely with user researcher colleagues from my delivery team and adjacent delivery teams to plan and gather insight and identify user needs.

• Involving my team and other stakeholders in iterative working sessions to map out client journeys.

• Creating a set of 'to be' client journeys and blueprints of the end-to-end service reflecting different evolving future capabilities and user needs and pain points.

• Mapping-out related 'as is' HMRC, DWP, DVLA and Local Authority benefit application processes and visualising interactions between passported benefits across other government departments.

• Facilitating frequent working sessions with Client Advisory teams and digital-technical teams to ensure they helped to shape the service design and ensure that we understood and designed against capacities and competencies.
  

Outcomes

• New ways to make it easier for clients to make applications to other UK government benefits, including an interim certificate of entitlement that Local Authorities and DVLA will automatically accept as evidence of the client's benefit award.

• My work with client advisory teams led to the development of a service 'wrap' around the points where clients need to make complex decisions.

• A variety of future digital opportunities that will combine new cross-government data sharing agreements, Scottish client data and new technical capabilities in the Scottish Government to improve the client experience by partly automating applications for a range of UK government and Scottish Local Authority benefits.

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The challenge

Six million people in the UK live in households where no one works, costing an estimated £13 billion a year in benefits. The long-term unemployed face barriers to getting back to work that tend to increase exponentially the longer they are out of work. These include health and social problems, lack of skills and drug and alcohol dependency.

In the City of Sunderland, 26% of working-age people were economically inactive, with almost four times as many people claiming Incapacity Benefit as the ordinary Job Seekers Allowance.

There was no active attempt to get Incapacity Benefit claimants back into work. Council budgets were being significantly stretched by benefit payouts and solutions that had little to no impact.

My involvement

• I worked closely with a researcher colleague to plan and undertake ethnographic research with people experiencing worklessness in Sunderland to understand their needs, behaviours and the different organisations they interacted with, including local councils, 3rd party advocacy organisations, medical services, and drug and alcohol dependency services.

• Mapping out a network of local services supporting people experiencing worklessness and health issues.

• I worked with my researcher colleague to conduct contextual research into their services. The research led to a series of personas and scenarios of worklessness to design against.

• As part of a small team, I facilitated co-design sessions that bought together Sunderland City Council strategy and client-facing teams and local 3rd party advocacy organisations to co-create service ideas and ideal journey designs for clients.
  

Outcomes

• A pilot of the scheme supported more than 1,000 people, of whom 275 found work. The total cost of running the pilot was £180,000 and the return, calculated by an independent evaluation, was that over £360,000 was saved for the Council by reducing welfare spending.

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The challenge

HMRC Policy Lab was approached by a policy team tasked with exploring how digital 'fiscal tills' could be legislated for and implemented in the UK to tackle fraudulent behaviour in small and medium-sized retail businesses.

Developing an understanding of how other nations have also implemented fiscal tills, their related government services, and what had led those countries to make those choices was an essential component of the work.

My involvement

As a senior service designer on the team:

• I determined how we could address the policy team's request.

• Designed and conducted a cross-national comparative analysis of 35 'fiscalised' nations.

• Identified meaningful variables and data that could be operationalised to determine how the UK and other fiscalised nations are similar or different.

• Conducted quantitative statistical analysis to identify three 'types' of fiscalised nations that operate one of two government service delivery models.
  

Outcomes

• A tripartite typology of fiscalised nations, based on their national economic and development, Legal and regulatory, technological infrastructure profiles, and their risk profiles.

• The identification of distinct design approaches to international government services concerning fiscal tills.

• The critical outcome of this work was a clear steer to policy on which model of fiscal tills to recommend to the minister.

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The challenge

HMRC Agent strategy team had been tasked with developing a strategic vision for using the relationship between HMRC, tax agents and their professional bodies to help improve the standards of tax professionalism.

The brief included developing future service propositions that could be put forward to senior decision-makers to help determine HMRC's strategy for tax agents.

My involvement

• I joined to support the development of service concepts.

• This work included supporting my user researcher colleague in planning and undertaking research, designing and facilitating co-design sessions with tax professionals, representative bodies and HMRC strategists to understand the needs of professionals and the tax administration.

• I developed and sketched out service ideas, and produced visual tools to communicate future service options.

• I created a strategy toolset that showed a strategic hierarchy, from a vision founded on insight to a set of distinct service propositions.
  

Outcomes

• The service proportions were taken forward and adopted by senior stakeholders during an HMRC 'fusion' event focusing on agent strategy.

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