HMRC Low Earners Pension Payment alpha assessment report

It is understood the underlying problem lies elsewhere, but the scope of this service is to solve a symptom of the wider problem.  Low earners contributing to pensions through Net Pay Arrangements (NPA) not receiving pension tax relief if their income is below the Personal Allowance, unlike those in Relief at Source (RAS) schemes who receive a 20% top-up. To address this, HMRC will issue Low Earners Pension Payments (LEPP) after the end of each tax year, starting with 2024 / 2025 contributions.  

The team has conducted 36 user research sessions throughout Alpha phase with good team engagement, which leads to design changes. 

The team has clearly taken an iterative approach to designing the service and they provided a detailed explanation of how a continuous integration (CI) pipeline will allow the team to iterate frequently upon completion of every user story 

The team is using common components for example HMRC’s Bank Account Reputation Service (BARS) and the standard patterns from the GOV.UK Design Library 

There is a high degree of reuse both in the production system and the tool-chain, which lowers most areas of technical risk. 

The service was rated amber for point 1 of the Standard. 

The team followed discovery user group findings and conducted user research sessions based on them. However the team has not continued exploring further in user groups and their needs, which might be missed out during the discovery phase. 

The end-to-end user journey was not fully mapped out, especially the user behaviour and pain points before they come to the service and after they leave the last page of the service.