How HMRC delivered the UK’s vital coronavirus response

Joanna Rowland, the project architect behind the government’s landmark economic response to the COVID-19 pandemic, lifts the lid on how the civil service delivered the UK’s furlough scheme so successfully that even the world wide web’s inventor Tim Berners-Lee was impressed.

As director of the COVID-19 Response Unit at Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), Joanna Rowland is currently responsible for the delivery of the department’s flagship COVID-19 economic interventions, the Coronavirus Job Retention and Self-Employment Income Support schemes. These have helped over 10 million UK citizens since their launch in spring.

Rowland is also head of the Project Delivery Profession within HMRC and, before being seconded to work on the COVID-19 response, was responsible for HMRC’s transformation portfolio, which has been described as the largest change agenda in Europe.

Having joined HMRC in September 2016 as programme director for the Making Tax Digital for Individuals programme, Rowland has already delivered several successful projects, including achieving growth of the Personal Tax Account to over 14 million customers. Before joining HMRC, Rowland delivered several major projects in government, including the Criminal Justice System Efficiency Programme, which transformed the criminal justice agenda.

In this article, Rowland shares her experiences as the senior responsible officer for the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS).

Making the furlough scheme happen

On 20 March 2020, in response to the unprecedented challenge presented by a global pandemic and a national lockdown, Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced the CJRS. The scheme would allow employers to claim financial support of up to 80 per cent of salaries, up to a maximum of £2,500 per month, per employee. This soon became known as the ‘furlough scheme’ and was pitched as the cornerstone of the government’s economic response.

The Friday before the announcement, I had been asked to lead the project as senior responsible officer. I had four weeks to create a team capable of designing and delivering the service, readying employers, and training and dispatching over 10,000 operational staff. Given the urgency of the task and government’s mixed reputation for delivering large-scale digital projects, this was a daunting proposition. However, we launched the service ahead of schedule, supporting over 140,000 employers to make a claim on day one, protecting millions of jobs.

So how did we do it? At the heart were some good old-fashioned project principles: knowing our purpose, creating urgency, deploying the right skills and relentless determination.

Knowing how essential robust project management is to delivery, I formed a small core team stacked with experience. I used a hub-and-spoke model to create a wider team of specialists including IT, digital, legal, policy, compliance, finance and operational colleagues. The key to success was binding this team to a single compelling purpose – to get the money to those who were entitled to it as fast as we could. A clear purpose helped us keep our focus, allowing us to make fast and pragmatic decisions, with work areas balancing risk and reward.

Keeping it ruthlessly simple

On day one, the chief information officer and I established a central guiding principle of keeping things ‘ruthlessly simple’ and then set about making design choices based on this. This balanced the need to ensure economic stability for the maximum number of employees with what we could deliver in the time scales, and the degree of risk we were willing to accept. Government schemes can be attractive to fraudsters and criminals, so we would normally take months, if not years, to design and deliver a service like this.

With time against us, we needed controls like never before. So, we applied full rigour to the control frameworks process but in a way that did not slow us down or become overly bureaucratic. The central project team quickly established a governance framework, decisions log and project plan – all closely monitored via daily calls and complemented by a weekly project board that acted as the decision-making body. Risk, issues and milestones were reviewed daily to track progress, and in the real heat of the delivery, we moved to hour-by-hour plans. Everything was about pace and control.

Due to the mission-criticality of successful delivery, the team had buy-in from all areas of Whitehall and phenomenal levels of senior leadership support, right up to the chancellor himself. This was key to our ability to make decisions quickly and our subsequent success. I spent many an exciting evening and weekend on the phone to the chancellor and his advisors, discussing policy and design options and their implications. On some days, our developers had finished coding the results of his decisions before the meeting in which they were made was over.

Breakneck delivery demanded agility

From the very early stages of the discussions, the time scales meant that HMRC’s traditional way of delivering this level of change was not viable. Instead we took a truly agile approach in which policy worked with delivery to establish the art of the possible in the limited time available. This real-time design was done with that core focus on keeping it simple and sticking to purpose. Where possible, our technology solution made use of existing patterns, providing a level of certainty and enabling speedy delivery. For example, the existing ‘front door’ of Government Gateway was used as the entry to the service.

Although the delivery of the policy, guidance and solution was important, it was also essential that we were able to support customers. This meant clear and concise guidance and providing a range of support tools, including webinars and step-by-step guides. We also had to move staff around internally and develop and deliver training to our fantastic operational colleagues supporting the scheme, all while adjusting to the brave new world of lockdown, with many staff working from home for the first time.

When we had the detailed policy in place, we realised that the claim calculation could be quite complex depending on employers’ circumstances, so we took the late decision to work up a CJRS claim calculator. Pulling in another very talented tech team and policy experts, we set about it just one week from go-live. To be honest, we didn’t expect to have this for launch, but actually delivered it early as a result of some amazing collaborative work between the policy and technical teams.

In advance of the launch, communications became vital. Our communications, developed by our superb in-house team, had two aims: informing the customer so they could adequately prepare and claim their grant, and mitigating contact to HMRC from concerned citizens. The reach they achieved in such a short time was incredible.

Waiting with baited breath

We also ran a small public beta before go-live, testing the system with small and large employers. This gave us some confidence that we had tested with real customers. So, we were ready. We had scaled up our capacity so that our platform could handle large volumes, we had our calculator, and we knew our system was easy for customers, but I still had a sleepless night before we launched the service on 20 April. A mere four weeks on from the chancellor’s announcement, never had we done anything this big or this important at such speed. The risk was enormous. One newspaper even told us they were keeping a page free to be ready to print how wrong it had all gone – so sure were they that this was a stretch too far for a government project.

The whole team held their breath as the first claims started to come in, but we needn’t have worried. At the end of day one, the system had performed brilliantly, we more than met customer demand for support, and we received unprecedented praise from customers, stakeholders and commentators across the spectrum. The IT delivery team were particularly excited to see a tweet praising their work from Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the world wide web. However, the launch of the service was not the end.

We were simultaneously delivering the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS), which, with 3.4 million eligible customers and only three weeks to go-live, was every bit as challenging and risky. Plus the chancellor was determined to keep his support for business high, so we were soon tasked with delivering an extension to the scheme, allowing businesses to furlough staff on a more flexible basis from July, bringing them back part-time where required. Employers were required to contribute towards the scheme from August, initially paying the National Insurance and pension costs in that month, plus 10 per cent of the wages in September, increasing to 20 per cent in October. This announcement meant moving back into the design phase and in some ways starting from scratch, although with the benefit of having the project team in place.

Unprecedented challenges

Although the schemes have been a success, the delivery was not without challenges. We were delivering this as the wider world also moved at pace. As part of my wider COVID-19 response role, we were also overseeing the urgent changes needed in HMRC’s wider operations, including getting 60,000 people working from home, establishing a series of steering groups operating across all COVID-19-related measures to help lock together all the departments’ activity, and ensuring the department had a plan for the summer.

Time is said to be the enemy of perfection, but we did not allow it to reduce our standards. We continue to iterate the service even now, with the benefit of user feedback. Delivering this type of service would usually take between nine and 18 months in government. If we had that time, it is likely that the service would have looked different. However, what we did have was a great team and a set-up that really harnessed expertise from across HMRC.

From our brilliant internal digital teams and knowledgeable technical architects to our fantastically resilient front-line staff and experts, once everyone got to know each other, the magic really happened. The role of projects is to make change happen, but it’s the experts who deliver the change. We drive, coordinate, control and corral, while harnessing the talent all around us.

The creation and delivery of CJRS and SEISS have been the most challenging projects of my career, but also by far the most rewarding. We have delivered a service we can be proud of and that has been vital in keeping businesses afloat and providing employees with a safety net. I have seen that first-hand with family members who were furloughed. I also believe that this success has improved the standing of HMRC in the eyes of the public, and I am honoured to have been involved.

This has proved that we, as project professionals, deserve our seat at the top tables of government and have the skills needed to deliver for our country in a crisis. After all, policy and strategy are just words on a page without great delivery turning it into something real, and this was very real.

Joanna Rowland spoke to Project editor Emma De Vita about her work throughout the pandemic for The APM Podcast’s ‘Crisis Talks’ series, available now at apm.org.uk/resources/the-apm-podcast/

The Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme was launched on 20 April 2020

Total number of jobs furloughed: 9.6m

Total number of employers furloughing: 1.2m

Total value of claims made: £33.8bn

Claims for the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme began on 13 May 2020

Total number of claims made: 2.7m

Total value of claims made: £7.8bn

Source: gov.uk, 2 August 2020

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