Contents

Aims

The Welsh Revenue Authority’s ambition is to become a fully digital tax organisation for Wales.

User-centred services, built on Agile principles, have the potential to make taxation simpler, fairer and more efficient.

The problem we're solving

We are exploring how a data platform for land and property in Wales could support geographically varied taxes. We are also considering how such a platform could be useful to a range of other Welsh organisations in local government or the third sector, for example.

We are:

  • clarifying the scale of ambition and where to start
  • bringing opportunities and challenges to life
  • giving ministers potential policy options
  • demonstrating new ways of working

Partners

We worked as a blended team made up of people from CDPS and the Welsh Revenue Authority.

Lessons learnt

What worked well

  • Working in the open (where possible)
  • Regular show and tells as governance
  • Autonomy to get on with it
  • Continuous planning
  • Starting small and iterating
  • Learning by making (as opposed to starting with a solution upfront)
  • Having LTT regional as a policy area to focus on

What could we have improved?

  • Having stable funding in place that would allow longer term planning
  • Engage more broadly to understand user needs of the platform and how it helps policy areas
  • Having a clearer message around the broader benefits of a platform outside of supporting LTT regional

Lessons for the next platform team

  • Be assertive about what it takes to run a sustainable platform
  • Ensure long term funding is in place
  • Appropriates skills, resources and knowledge
  • Ensure the platform is seen as a critical part of national infrastructure, rather than attached to a particular policy

Next steps

Regional LTT will be able to benefit from all we have learnt about property data, users, technology and policy decisions.

Despite not being able to fully use platform for LTT regional there will be many aspects of the platform work that will be transferred to the LTT Regional service team.

Following the Welsh Government's announcement of a plan to vary land transaction tax locally, we'll be using data to explore policy options with WRA and the Treasury.

Blog posts on GitHub

What we learned about users - published 16 May 2022

How we used weeknotes - published 10 May 2022

What we've learned about working in the open - published 5 April 2022

What do we mean by a data platform? - published 2 March 2022