March 6, 2025
After 10 incredible years, our work on HMRC’s award winning, Multi-channel Digital Tax Platform (MDTP) has come to a close. When we started working with the UK’s tax authority, HMRC had identified a need to move to cloud services, to take advantage of new and emerging cloud technology for its public-facing IT services.
An organisation like HMRC needs to be able to manage services at scale; Equal Experts helped build MDTP as an opinionated platform operating You Build it, You Run it approaches, which allows them to scale securely, putting the focus on solving business problems rather than technology problems. Here’s how a decade of working together has given HMRC the capability to create digital services that meet the needs of 50 million people and 5 million organisations reliably, repeatedly and at scale.
HMRC’s difficult to navigate systems were based on technical architecture that was struggling to keep up with demand. Nowhere was this felt more acutely than during the peak of Self-Assessment in January every year. This was an annual event that brought intense stress at times for staff at HMRC.
In 2014, in the UK Cabinet Office, a move was underfoot in Government Digital Services (GDS) to find a new way to make UK tax services ‘Digital By Default’. The idea was for all UK citizens to be able to use government services in the same way that they would within the private sector, using the internet and mobile apps instead of paper tax returns.
HMRC sponsors created a space with the specific intention of exploring with a supplier what could be done differently to transform the organisation’s digital capacity. This work would be separate from – but needed to integrate with – existing legacy systems, the supplier was Equal Experts, and this was the birth of MDTP.
A small team of Equal Experts consultants worked collaboratively with HMRC service managers who knew what they wanted but needed the technical support to develop that vision. Together, we built exemplar services in a new way, adhering to GDS standards but using whatever tooling we thought would fit the bill. This was a bold decision at the time, only possible thanks to the executive sponsorship of HMRC’s Chief Technical Officer and Programme Manager.
The challenge was to build a completely greenfield service, from scratch, with no existing infrastructure or framework of expectations. We chose technologies and hosting tools we knew would give us the greatest flexibility to build services that would meet user needs and enable scale. As we worked and iterated, it became clear to HMRC that the model we’d developed worked really well. The foundation we’d built was enabling other teams (including those working with legacy systems) to create the services that worked for them, quickly. Those services – built on the infrastructure managed by this small team – were reliable, received good feedback, and user satisfaction scores were high.
What we were looking at here was scale of an organic nature. Over the next few years, HMRC scaled to offer hundreds of tax services, all built on the framework that had begun life as the model we’d created. The team grew in size, adding consultants and HMRC engineers as we began to define the platform as an opinionated model, providing all of the building blocks required for other digital teams to be able to create the public-facing services they needed.
The ripple effect was huge: our blended platform team of 100 was able to support 800 HMRC and supplier engineers to deliver and operate thousands of microservices in production. It’s now possible for HMRC to build a service and put it into production for the public to use in a matter of minutes.
The most high profile example of MDTP’s power happened when Covid-19 hit; just 4 weeks after the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (JRS), it was up and running. The Statutory Sick Pay Rebate Scheme and the Self Employed Income Support Scheme came not long after. After a single day of JRS, the dashboard was successfully processing hundreds of thousands of eligible claims amounting to over £1.5B, with customer satisfaction scores close to 100%, indicating that the vast majority of UK taxpayers were able to self-serve what they needed during a time of economic crisis.
Previously, this kind of service would have taken 9-18 months to build. The other really big annual peak of activity, Self Assessment, happened without incident on the digital frontend. Many of the advance preparation activities that are still needed for the backend systems are no longer required on the frontend thanks to the reliability and scalability of the platform.
Financially, what Equal Experts supported HMRC to achieve with MDTP is something most large organisations hadn’t seen before – an affordable way to enable sustainable innovation and run digital services at scale. It now costs HMRC just a fraction of the usual cost of running a platform able to support this level of services.
The platform team is centrally funded, which means the team doesn’t charge other areas of HMRC for the capabilities it provides. This includes the cost of hosting their services, and the technology and applications required to build them. It removes a layer of friction and dependency, freeing up users to develop the services they need for their customers, when they need them.
During the very first conversations that would eventually lead to MDTP, the idea that the UK government might one day be writing software with code in the open and available for the public to reuse (a consequence of writing code in the public cloud) was unthinkable. But the principles of GDS included the premise that the public should be able to benefit from the work that HMRC does.
In line with this aspiration, Equal Experts collaborated with HMRC’s security teams to find a safe and responsible way to make all of our code repositories public unless deemed too sensitive. This means that the vast majority of code is available to the general public to use globally in a business context. At the time, this was a bold decision for a government department to make, and something which we’re very proud to have facilitated. The added bonus to HMRC is £millions in savings due to the use of open-source technologies instead of relying on expensive contracts.
We achieved this in part by leveraging the most appropriate secure public cloud providers for each stage of our work on the platform. It’s a pioneering approach that – once upon a time – wouldn’t have been expected of a UK government department.
Essentially, Equal Experts has supported HMRC to – affordably and reliably – build public-facing services that meet the needs of the general public in a better way than they ever have before. Thanks to the platform, teams had the ability to respond to change faster than ever before, delivering vital services to keep businesses (and the economy) running during the pandemic.
Furthermore, the platform and approach we leave them with has enabled HMRC to build the internal capability to continue creating and operating services themselves, as an ‘intelligent client’. We’ve consistently sought to transfer our expertise and ways of working to HMRC’s own employees so that they can lead on innovation and own capabilities without a reliance on suppliers. Around 65% of the team making decisions about the platform now are civil servants, with only 35% consultants, an unusual mix for most big organisations.
This work was much more than building a platform. MDTP is a full-capability product that’s been repeatedly iterated on (HMRC has changed cloud provider 4 times with no downtime) to provide continued value to the UK taxpayer. It’s the result of 10 years of executive sponsorship and investment by HMRC that has created a bespoke Platform as a Service (PaaS) product composed of people, processes, and tools that enable teams to rapidly develop, iterate, and operate first class digital services.
We are incredibly proud of the forward-thinking culture we’ve helped to create within MDTP. This is the result of an amalgamation between Equal Experts’ transparent and collaborative ways of working and the sponsorship of HMRC’s senior leaders tasked with making this happen. It’s a no-blame culture of trust where everybody has a stake in the work that they do; it’s a very refreshing place to work, so much so that cross-pollination is even starting to happen across other departments within the organisation.
All business models have their pros and cons. But, when you consider the type of problems we help our clients to solve at Equal Experts, it’s worth thinking about the level of experience and the best consultancy approach to solve them.
If you’d like to find out more about working with us – get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.
