In March we blogged about HMRC’s web guidance and tools moving to the cross-Government GOV.UK website.
Since then, Statutory Pay and High Income Child Benefit Charge content has moved, with customers being automatically redirected from the HMRC website to GOV.UK. We’ve also been working with the Government Digital Service to develop new (or updated) content for Tax Credits, Child Benefit, PAYE and VAT, which will soon be available on GOV.UK.
We are developing a new service for our technical manuals too. We’ve selected the Employment Income Manual as our test case because it is heavily used, both by HMRC and external customers - and it contains all the features needed to test our users’ needs.
We’ll share a public beta (pilot) version of the new service in coming months, showing our initial thoughts and the progress we’ve made. You’ll also be able to give the development team direct feedback on the site - which will help us to check whether we’ve got the functionality right, and whether you find the service easy to use.
The service will be continually refined and improved throughout its development, and work to migrate our remaining manuals to GOV.UK will only begin after a period of extensive testing. This will take a number of months to complete, due to the size of the task – around 80,000 web pages.
Please use this blog to comment on the GOV.UK transition. Your views matter – and can make a real difference.
6 comments
Comment by Daniel Chatfield posted on
I can't wait for this, the HMRC website is one of the worst websites I have to use.
Comment by AB posted on
It would be a whole lot better if it had a decent search engine. I try to think of key words for my query but the top answers can be quite bizarre.
Comment by Lawrence How posted on
Please make what is on each page longer. It is a pain having to print off so many small bits.
Comment by Erica Scott posted on
As an accountant, I can't say that I'm looking forward to the move to GOV.UK. There's too much scrolling on this site - you lose half a page just on the titles alone - it'd be nice to see everything without having to constantly scroll up and down. Far too much white-space.
For a while (I mean a few years ago) the HMRC site was actually ok, then they tinkered with the search facility and it's gone downhill since then.
I guess this is what 'improving' means.......
Comment by Conor posted on
Agreed. The layout is awful on this site and the sexiest Google-esque font in the world isn't gonna gloss over that.
It smacks of software developers trying to be smart. Why is the Tags panel taking up so much space. Who actually cares what tags are in place. We've already found the page, so it adds no value...
Comment by Toni Clark posted on
Thanks. Others have raised the same point and we're monitoring feedback on this. We're looking at possible solutions but you should still be able to find the manuals through the GOV.UK search engine or from the link on the tax agents' page. https://www.gov.uk/dealing-with-hmrc/tax-agent-guidance