Breaking bad policy: how we built HMRC's policy lab

HMRC’s Policy Lab has been running now for 5 years and we want to share our journey.

From how we got started and thinking about our operating model, to understanding where and how we can have impact, building the right team and culture and how we measure success.

This session will also share our next big step: expanding our work beyond policy and embedding ourselves and User Centred Design in early organisational change activities.

Despite this talk’s title we don’t have the view that HMRC creates bad policy, but we do know it’s hard for policy colleagues to get the space and time to engage with all their users - that’s where we come in.

Our aim is to provide a user-focused approach that ensures policy is feasible, meets its intent and delivers value for money. That’s quite a big ambition but one we believe we’re delivering on, so we want to share our journey and what we’ve learnt along the way.

This talk also explores the complicated question of how to measure the success of our work and touches on the environment we as leaders can create to help our teams and people develop and hopefully flourish.

Participant Takeaways:
This session will give you get a better sense of:

• Setting up HMRC’s Policy Lab team and how we’re evolving the work we do further.
• How we’re assessing the value and impact of the work we do.
• Creating environments for teams and people to thrive in.
• The challenges we faced and missteps we made.

Themes:
Policy design, Building a team & its culture, overcoming challenges, defining an operating model, measuring success, governance, using data and tools.