HMRC perm sec JP Marks on empowerment, Covid and his plans for the department
Gareth Southgate is perhaps not the most successful manager of the English football team (that honour must surely go to Sir Alf Ramsey, who led the 1966 squad to World Cup victory), but he’s the only one whose career arc and distinctive approach to leadership made him a national treasure and inspired an Olivier-award winning play, Dear England.
Southgate’s leadership style includes investing in his players’ mental resilience as well as their technical skills, and fostering a strong sense of accountability for standards in the team. Southgate has also said he wants to empower the players, making sure they feel involved in the team’s overall strategy because, as he once put it, “in the 85th minute, they’ve got to make a decision that might win or lose the game, and we can’t make all those decisions from the sideline”.
HM Revenue and Customs’ permanent secretary, JP Marks, may or may not be channelling Southgate when he spends – by his own admission – “far too much time” thinking over the teamsheet as the coach for his daughter’s under-10s team. Since he and his family live in Scotland, the perm sec might well find more inspiration in another famous football manager and Glasgow native: Sir Alex Ferguson.
Whoever inspires his coaching style on the sidelines each Sunday, Marks certainly shares Southgate’s belief in the importance of empowerment and accountability when he returns to his day job. Those are two words he repeats again and again when telling CSW about an ambitious program of change for HMRC – which he joined in spring 2025 – and when he reflects on what he learned from working at the forefront of change in DWP for much of his career.
Our discussion takes place in a large meeting room in the warren of corridors at 100 Parliament Street, a building HMRC shares with DCMS and other government departments at the southern end of Whitehall. While the room is beautiful, it does feel a rather incongruous setting.
For a start, it’s in London – where Marks spends only around a third of his working time, according to his own rough estimate. His working base is Queen Elizabeth House, a government hub in Edinburgh, the city where he lives. His travel schedule in the first months of the job has been “pretty busy”, he says, but most of the time he’s visiting frontline colleagues across the country, rather than only the London HQ.
A few weeks before our interview, for example, he visited teams in Belfast to find out how they are working with Border Force and Belfast Port officials to embed the Windsor Framework, and his namechecking of other recent visits (“Glasgow, Newcastle, Stratford, Croydon, Birmingham… you name it”) is a reminder of just how widely HMRC is spread across the country.
That geographic diversity stretches right to the top. Not only is Marks based in Edinburgh, but five other executive committee members operate from outside London – including his second perm sec, Angela MacDonald, in Leeds. The opportunity to “role model Places for Growth”, and show that senior leadership doesn’t need to be all based in London, was part of what attracted him to apply for the role.
“Obviously I checked carefully through the process to make sure everyone agreed,” he says. “But for our people in HMRC, it’s very positive. They want to be able to build civil service careers in all four nations and regions of the UK, and increasingly, that is possible.”
“We want to build trust and transparency, share the problems and co-create the change, and we recognise we can't do all that on our own”
The other incongruity about our meeting room is that it is lined with glazed bookcases holding row upon row of serious-looking tomes – seemingly bound copies of Hansard debates dating back a century or so. Yet, while the room is redolent with the history and traditions of government, our conversation focuses on the future and how HMRC will deliver a “simpler tax and customs system [that fits] seamlessly into the way that customers run their lives and business”.
The quote comes from HMRC’s Transformation Roadmap, published in July, which sets out how the department is moving towards its long-term vision and is structured around three priorities.
The first two priorities – improving day-to-day business and customer experience, and closing the tax gap – are supported by the third: modernising and reforming the tax system. All three are underpinned by a commitment to change how HMRC delivers transformation, shifting from large-scale programmes to a more iterative, agile approach that sharpens accountability and invites greater external challenge.
Marks is so proud of the ambition and purpose behind the roadmap that he’s brought a hard copy for CSW to take away. “The reason we care about the roadmap is: we want to work more in the open. We want to build trust and transparency and share the problems and co-create the change, and we recognise we can’t do all that on our own,” he says.
The document sets out details of what HMRC will do to achieve each priority, as well as a list of metrics against which it will both track progress and publish updates each year (see boxes for more details). But while it has set out a strategic and enterprise-level plan for how HMRC wants to change, Marks adds that the “detailed design” of how all this actually happens will be achieved by empowering teams within HMRC to “innovate faster” and to improve their areas in the way that makes most sense for each tax regime.
“So that’s what we’re trying to do: get the right enterprise strategy and then get the right empowerment of our teams to accelerate innovation. We’re not there yet. There’s definitely more to support that way of working.”
Two elements of this are worth flagging up for CSW readers keen on tracking how change is happening across government. The first is a commitment to greater use of sandboxes – a technique that tests new ways of working in controlled, isolated environments.
HMRC’s director general for customer services, Myrtle Lloyd, described how this works on a recent episode of the CSW podcast: “You take a bit of a problem, you take it to one side, and you really study it in many dimensions,” she said. “Having done it, then you take it out of the sandbox environment, potentially pilot it to see whether it works with a bigger group and then, if it does, you scale it up. It’s a way for us to de-risk our experimentation, but also create a whole lot of engagement and excitement about doing stuff differently.”
The approach has been used to understand why customers were struggling to use HMRC’s digital services, and trial things which will help them to do so – such as having helpline advisers offer real-time coaching to support callers to use self-service options.
Marks describes the mechanism as a way to accelerate change, saying that by empowering and supporting a team to really understand problems and the drivers of those problems, they can “release change that makes a difference faster”. Alongside these focused areas of change, he pays tribute to the department’s digital, change and transformation teams, who are more regularly releasing new functionality across HMRC’s systems to meet user needs.
Together this work is helping to shift the way customers use HMRC’s services. He points to one of the roadmap’s key indicators – the proportion of customers who interact with HMRC digitally. “At the end of 2024, that was around 73 to 75%,” Marks says. “Today, the rate is almost 80%, with a clear expectation that this will increase further.”
He adds that in the longer term, it will be important to quicken the pace of change, not just in customer-facing services but across all of the department’s systems, so it is an “end-to-end transformation, rather than just on the front end”.
Some of that is already happening, he says, “but there’s more to come”, and the sandbox approach encapsulates the way he wants to see HMRC operate in the future. “Multidisciplinary teams, able to focus on key problem statements, with the capability to then make a difference: that is core to the culture that I want to support at HMRC. I see pockets of it already, which is really encouraging, and there’s loads of opportunity to build on that in the years ahead.”
“What we learned is you can accelerate transformation over a sustained period, but you do need to maximise empowerment”
Alongside this culture of empowering teams, there needs to be strong accountability for both spending and increasing collection of public revenue. So, the second mechanism mentioned in HMRC’s roadmap as a driver of change is also a means of sharpening accountability: the creation of tax regime owners. A tax regime traditionally refers to the legislation, regulation and policy governing how a tax is calculated and collected. Under HMRC’s new model, it also encompasses the digital, commercial and operational capabilities that support tax administration. Previously, responsibilities were spread across teams, which made it harder to respond quickly to new priorities.
To address this, HMRC is establishing “end-to-end” leaders for each regime – enabling faster decisions and clearer prioritisation. These owners provide ministers with comprehensive advice, integrating insights from policy, operations, user research and stakeholders. They then have the ability to coordinate different teams and implement ministers’ decisions effectively. As Marks notes, this approach mirrors best practice: a single leader who knows their system inside out and can convene colleagues and partners with confidence.
While technical skills like data science and project management matter for these new leaders, “the thing they need to be best at is collaboration, and that’s a leadership skill that we can nurture in our organisation”, Marks says.
Marks is part of the civil service leadership group, led by cabinet secretary Sir Chris Wormald and Cabinet Office perm sec Cat Little. He is enthused about the opportunities he sees to improve leadership capability right across government – whether in relation to AI, service transformation, collaboration or simply modelling a more productive and agile approach to public service delivery.
Marks learned about leadership by taking inspiration where he found it throughout his career. The model of an end-to-end leader was one he saw work very well at DWP with Universal Credit, where a “fabulous multidisciplinary team” was put together by the product owner and SRO.
Marks spent five years working on Universal Credit, having been drafted in from Jobcentre Plus to take part in a “red-teaming” exercise as part of the 2013 “reset” for the long-running benefits reform programme.
Working in the red team was in itself “quite an experience, quite intense”, he recalls. But it obviously hooked him into the importance of the change, and he worked in a number of roles across the programme.
Marks was grateful for the digital and adaptable nature of the Universal Credit system in 2020 when, having been made DWP’s director general for work and health and head of Jobcentre Plus, he was at the front line of the department’s work to rapidly pivot the benefits system in response to the Covid pandemic.
“Our front line want to deliver a good service. What I hear consistently is that that is not as easy as it should be”
DWP perm sec Sir Peter Schofield spoke to CSW last year about a pivotal moment in spring 2020 when the department’s executive committee realised they needed to skip almost all the early stages of their pandemic response plan and move all their resources to Jobcentre Plus. “We looked at the spike in claims and thought, if this is the first indication of the impact of a future lockdown, we’re going to have to do something very dramatic,” Schofield said.
“As a result, we pivoted the whole organisation into paying Universal Credit claims first and foremost. If we hadn’t done it, looking back, we would have been overwhelmed. But at the time, it felt like a massive, dramatic step.” What are Marks’s reflections on that dramatic time? “Peter led the department through the pandemic with deep integrity. We would speak every day in those early weeks and months,” he says.
“On the one hand, it was, of course, very daunting. On the other hand, it was one of those moments where we got to see the civil service at its most resilient, creative best and watch teams, over 24 or 48 hours, rewriting guidance processes, pivoting to different systems and retraining at scale to cope [with the demand]. Of course, with HMRC’s furlough scheme and the other employment schemes, we ultimately emerged from the pandemic with unemployment relatively low, and it could have been very different.
“One of the things that Peter did exceptionally well through that period was get the balance right between empowerment and accountability,” Marks adds.
“We would be sending him daily updates outlining the policy and process changes we had made that day, along with our best assessment on impact. All of that would then be on the record for our executive team, and he could note the progress and update ministers accordingly.
“We felt supported in moving at that pace. At the same time, we were clear: he’s the accounting officer, and he’s accountable... So I think what we learned in that period is you can accelerate transformation over a sustained period, but you do need to maximise empowerment and you need to join up multidisciplinary teams and give them the capabilities they need to take risk-based judgements, accelerate the change and deliver impact.”
Marks spent much of his career at DWP, an operational department similar in scale and complexity to HMRC. While HMRC’s role as the UK’s tax authority is unique, he notes that it’s not uncommon for officials to move between the two organisations. Their respective executive teams meet frequently to discuss things like data sharing and fraud, and the departments also have shared dependencies on key systems like real-time information and National Insurance, he says. “So it’s obviously been a busy first six months getting to know the HMRC team, but I have been working with HMRC in different guises over the last two decades. So it feels like a good place to be.”
Between the two departments, Marks spent three and a half years as permanent secretary of the Scottish Government – he describes that time as a privilege and notes, with some understatement, that he and the three first ministers he served (Nicola Sturgeon, Humza Yousaf and John Swinney) “stepped through some tough times” together. This encompasses the global shocks of the end of a global public health emergency and double-digit inflation with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, as well as the political upheaval caused by rapid changes of leadership in the Scottish National Party (which he doesn’t mention explicitly, opting instead to talk of “delivering the first ministers’ programmes in the context of a lot of change”).
At a Treasury Select Committee hearing over the summer, Marks set out the challenges and opportunities he had observed coming into HMRC. One challenge was the need to rebuild trust in the system, and the other was staff engagement. At 56%, HMRC’s staff engagement score in last year’s Civil Service People Survey was nearly 10 percentage points below the civil service average – though it has been moving upwards in the last five years and Marks is confident that the department is making inroads in improving engagement further. Asked to reflect on what makes the difference, Marks links it back to the importance of connecting to purpose and improving experiences for customers and colleagues.
“For our front line, they want to deliver a good service. They want to look after the wellbeing of their customer, be customer-centric, make sure that they can answer that inquiry ‘once and done’. And that is what I’ve found on all the visits I’ve undertaken so far in the role. But what I hear consistently is a frustration that that is not as easy as it should be.”
He is positive about the progress made on improving things like average speed to answer the phone and other indicators of customer experience, but he also points out the importance of HMRC staff understanding the deeper purpose behind their work, which he describes as, “ultimately, funding the nation”.
“Already, last year, we exceeded our yield targets and bought in record revenue that funds our public services in this country. That will increasingly remain the case,” he says. And he wants teams to take pride in that, as well as understanding the changes that are under way in terms of meeting the roadmap’s three priorities.
“People are responding well to that sense of purpose but, as always with big operational organisations, the proof is in the pudding. You know: ‘I like the narrative, now show me the delivery.’ And the strategy is delivery: constantly improve outcomes and, I hope, engagement will follow as people feel there’s a sense of momentum and feel that sense of pride and that sense of progress. But at the end of the day, we have to deliver.”
Closing the Tax Gap
The government has estimated that in 2023-24, the UK’s “tax gap” (the difference between what is owed and what is actually collected) stood at £46.8bn, or about 5.3% of total possible revenue.
To close this gap, HMRC intends not only to make it easier for taxpayers to get their tax paid correctly and on time – improving compliance – but also to improve its capacity and capability to tackle non-compliance through more, and better equipped, compliance and debt-management officers.
The 2025 Spending Review included plans to recruit 5,500 more compliance officers and 2,400 more debt officers. “That’s a significant scaling-up of HMRC and a real investment in our front line, which is great,” Marks says. “We obviously need to move smartly with onboarding that capacity, building on the opportunities of Places for Growth [to access different talent pools] and to consolidate that capability well so we keep quality high.”
HMRC is also investing in digital capabilities to get better at things like data segmentation and using third-party data to improve the productivity of compliance work. It has already announced a series of targeted crackdowns on high-risk taxpayers such as wealthy individuals and “phoenix” companies that dissolve and re-emerge to dodge liabilities.
In the longer term, the aim is to make it easier for taxpayers – including small businesses, who make up some 60% of the tax gap – to get their tax right the first time, preventing non-compliance rather than having to spot and tackle it after the fact.
For more details on tax gap projections see the OBR’s Fiscal and Economic Outlook, Nov 2025
Customer services
HMRC’s customer service levels have come in for plenty of flak recently – with a critical NAO report (and the subsequent PAC report) highlighting long waiting times for people calling the department, and delays with processing.
The department has a target that at least 90% of all customer interactions should be digital by 2030. To underpin this, it will be investing in new technologies but it will also change the way it designs and runs services so it’s easier for taxpayers to get things done – and done right.
Customers can already use a range of digital services, including the HMRC mobile app – which in 2024-25 had around six million users – and in the next financial year, a new online service will roll out to allow all PAYE taxpayers (about 35 million people) to check and update their tax details directly and in real time.
Other planned improvements include a pre-population of self assessment returns with child benefit data from April 2026 onward, and a digital inheritance tax service by 2027–28.
HMRC is also embedding AI-powered digital assistants to answer queries online at any time, reducing the need for phone calls or paper correspondence, and will also expand online tracking tools so people can check the status of claims or refunds themselves.
To measure success, HMRC will monitor the share of digital interactions, customer-satisfaction ratings for digital services and reductions in customer calls and paper correspondence.