Welsh Revenue Authority – land and property data proof of concept
What’s the goal?
Build a working proof of concept to demonstrate how data can support simpler, fairer and more efficient devolved land and property taxation.
What problems could it solve for people?
The Welsh Revenue Authority’s ambition is to become a fully digital tax organisation for Wales. User-centred services, built on Agile principles, have the potential to make taxation simpler, fairer and more efficient.
We are exploring how a data platform for land and property in Wales could support geographically varied taxes. We are also considering how such a platform could be useful to a range of other Welsh organisations in local government or the third sector, for example.
We are:
- clarifying the scale of ambition and where to start
- bringing opportunities and challenges to life
- giving ministers potential policy options
- demonstrating new ways of working
Who’s involved?
A blended team made up of CDPS and the Welsh Revenue Authority.
What has CDPS done so far?
Following the proof of concept phase, we’ve been using real data to build prototype services. Prototypes have helped us to explore:
- what we need to do to host and operate a data platform
- how we can use data from many sources to help build services
- how we might model geographically varied taxes
What’s coming up next?
This project was paused after the first two phases ended successfully. The work we completed in the first couple of phases has highlighted the opportunities a land and property data platform presents. Notably, the learnings from the work have changed WRA’s understanding of how best to apply increased rates of Land Transaction Tax for second homes and holiday lets.
However, given the fast-emerging financial pressures we are all contending with and the uncertainty that brings, WRA have concluded that they need to prioritise and pause the wider land and property data platform work for now.
We are determined to re-start this work in future.
How will this work help to deliver the digital strategy for Wales?
The digital maturity assessment and prototyping exercise will help to deliver upon two of the strategy’s missions:
Mission 1: digital services
Deliver and modernise services so that they are designed around user needs and are simple, secure and convenient.
Mission 4: digital economy
Drive economic prosperity and resilience by embracing and exploiting digital innovation.
Blog posts
From data to debt, what I’ve learned working with CDPS – published 14 October 2022
How Welsh Revenue Authority is achieving better debt outcomes – published 29 September 2022
What we learned about users – published 16 May 2022
How we used weeknotes – published 10 May 2022
What we’ve learned about working in the open – published 5 April 2022
What do we mean by a data platform? – published 2 March 2022
Helping the Welsh Revenue Authority become fully digital – published 23 February 2022
