Section head
HMRC
HM Revenue & Customs is a non-ministerial Government Department that promotes gender equality and diversity to staff and customers. Its aim is to administer the tax and customs control systems fairly and efficiently and make it as easy as possible for individuals and businesses to understand and comply with their obligations and receive their tax credit and other entitlements.
HMRC is committed to ensuring that equality of opportunity is an integral part of all it does. Commitment to diversity is fundamental to all its transactions with customers and HMRC expects everyone in the organisation to understand and meet their responsibilities for gender equality and diversity to colleagues and customers.
HMRC aspires to be the public sector’s employer of choice, attracting and retaining the best from the widest pool of talent, developing people to the level of their potential and inclination. HMRC recognises that good diversity and equality management helps to improve business delivery and customer service, bringing benefits for the organisation and its employees.
HMRC’s Gender Equality Scheme details gender equality objectives, focusing particularly on the different needs of customers – both men and women. HMRC will be working hard to achieve these objectives over the coming months.Success in action
HMRC values its customers and has set up a system of appointments with home visits available upon request to assist those with caring responsibilities and/or mobility problems. Also some helpdesks, such as those covering child benefit and tax credits, are open from 8am to 8pm.
The recent merger to form HMRC from the Inland Revenue and HM Customs & Excise provided the opportunity to take the best from both Departments’ diversity programmes which has led to improved benefits for staff. One of these is the Childcare Voucher Scheme for which HMRC’s first month’s take-up outstripped any other organisation in that period. This scheme is open to men and women equally with significant savings to be achieved on childcare via a salary sacrifice scheme which gives exemption from income tax and national insurance contributions. HMRC offers a full range of flexible working options enabling staff to ask for a change of working pattern, including home/remote working or changing hours of work, in order to meet their domestic responsibilities. There are also various leave schemes including maternity, adoption, parental, paternity and special leave which includes breaks to care for dependants.
The Department has eight diversity staff network groups, four of which are gender related, and each one has a Board level champion. HMRC senior managers have objectives relating to diversity and equality in their performance agreement and are appraised annually on delivery. These staff networks have made a positive impact by giving policy makers immediate access to staff who can consider policies from a gender equality perspective; raising issues directly with the senior champions leads to early action/resolution.
Combined with flexible working options, improvements to internal and external recruitment systems have led to increases in the number of women in the Senior Civil Service and at top management grades.
The impact
HMRC is a fairy new Department having been created from the merger of the Inland Revenue and HM Customs and Excise. Commitment to equality and diversity was high on the merger agenda and has given the Department a positive way forward involving staff and customers in any future actions. The strategy clearly focuses on putting the needs of customers at the heart of any actions taken whilst also setting the agenda for the changes that lie ahead for a still emerging Department.