Helping HMRC deliver its new plastic packaging tax platform

The plastic packaging tax (PPT) came into force on 1 April 2022 to help tackle the problem of plastic pollution. It is designed to tax businesses who are manufacturing or importing plastic packaging into the UK with less than 30% of recycled plastic content.

HMRC needed a digital solution for business users to register, submit a return form and make payments. Opencast worked with HMRC’s digital platform teams and other IT partners to complete and deliver the new service.

A multi-disciplinary Opencast team provided technical, user-centred design (UCD) and delivery expertise. Our consultants collaborated closely with the wider team, and were able to use extensive knowledge of HMRC’s multi-channel digital tax platform (MDTP) to help.

A crucial element of the project was to help build the trust and confidence of stakeholders in the emerging product – and to create documentation and evidence to support the team’s development choices.

Software lifecycle from application development through to release and IT operations: we followed an agile and iterative approach (using scrum principles), releasing in small increments. We worked within HMRC’s infrastructure and harnessed HMRC pipelines to regularly test and deploy into production. We also re-evaluated development processes and followed test and behaviour-driven development best practices. 

Supporting live service, harnessed automated tooling: to support rapid releases (Jenkins for CI/CD) and harnessed HMRC ‘scaffolds’ to build pages, forms and journeys quickly, enabling rapid form creation and deployment. HMRC scaffolds have helped to drive consistency, improve quality and reduce feature creation time. This also supports a UCD approach to build the journey up progressively, creating an MVP then iterating and improving. 

Dev/Sec/Ops engineering and platform development: integrate within HMRC’s platforms and configure our instances in the platform appropriately. 

Applying enduring care in live: using various monitoring tools and optimising their use, we lowered alerting thresholds and uncovered issues that needed to be resolved at pace. This was also made possible by ensuring that our code base is prepared to deploy imminently. We also provided out-of-hours support when required. We significantly reduced live service issues that were prevalent when we took over the service. As part of our approach to troubleshooting incidents we also ‘crowded’ solutions, hackathon-style, bringing together varied teams.

Users of the new PPT service were able to successfully complete a three-point process of registration, form submission and payment. The new service was also able to handle penalties and allow users to amend their return.

Opencast helped to test and iterate the live service, ensuring the solution remained in line with user needs and Government Service Standard accessibility requirements. A holistic scaffold review reduced the time needed to create new features by approximately 60%.

As a new tax, PPT went through policy changes as it developed. A strong commitment to internal collaboration continued, and trusted ways of working and business values ensured a smooth transition to the new service.

Opencast’s input into the development of the new platform helped PPT to pass its public beta assessment at the first attempt in November 2022. In June 2023, the HMRC PPT team passed its GDS assessment to take the service live.

In May 2023, PPT was shortlisted for ‘outstanding team of the year’ by the UK Real IT Awards. In addition, the Digital Technology Leaders Awards ranked the PPT project as ‘highly commended’ in its 'most successful environmental project' category.

Impact stats below from PPT stats page on GOV.UK