HMRC has sent the Institute to two updates concerning their manuals and a request has been made to share your feedback. The latest HMRC Guidance Strategy Forum minutes are also available.

“Brexit banner messaging

On 23 December we applied the banner message to our manuals “You should check the other guidance available on GOV.UK from HMRC as Brexit updates to those pages are being prioritised before manuals.” Our platform could only allow us to automatically put the banner on all or no manuals. Most of our manuals have had the necessary Brexit updates made so we are removing this banner message. The owners of manuals where it will still take time to make the necessary updates will consider manually applying a tailored banner message on their manual (or parts of it) in the coming weeks. As always, please continue to use our feedback routes if you have any comments on the content.

Manuals feedback routes

GDS have made two recent changes to the feedback routes since we shared our original comms on 22 September. We have updated our comms below to reflect the changes which involve the:

• wording of the anonymous feedback route for submitting comments (in the blue footer) being amended from ‘Is there anything wrong with this page?’ to ‘Report a problem with this page’ (mainly a cosmetic change)
• removal of the ‘Give feedback about this page’ link that was within the manuals header in the top-right corner of the page and took users to the Contact GOV.UK form.

The removal was to align it with other GOV.UK products but it also coincided with our own direction as it was best for users to go to the feedback routes in the blue footer which our HMRC Manuals Team monitors directly. However, if a reply is needed, the Contact GOV.UK form can still be accessed using the ‘Contact’ link as described in the comms message.

HMRC wants your feedback on their manuals

HMRC welcomes feedback on their manuals published on GOV.UK to help with continuously improving them. Here we explain how to do that, depending on what you want to say and whether you need a reply.

Let HMRC know a page was helpful or unhelpful

Below the main content of any manual page you will find some text on the left-hand side asking, ‘Is this page useful?’. You can answer either ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ anonymously and doing so really helps HMRC to understand what guidance is working as intended and what needs their attention. If you answer ‘No’ you also get the option to provide your email address so you can be sent a generic survey about GOV.UK. This goes way beyond HMRC’s manuals – you can provide this sort of feedback on almost all GOV.UK pages.

Anonymously report anything from a typo or a broken link, to missing or incorrect information

Again, below the main content of the page but on the right-hand side there is text stating, ‘Report a problem with this page’. Following that link lets you tell HMRC what you were trying to do on the page and what issues you encountered. HMRC monitors this anonymous feedback closely and subject matter experts make changes to the manuals to fix errors and improve clarity. Again, you can provide feedback in this way for almost all pages on GOV.UK and HMRC uses these comments to improve its other guidance too.

Provide more detailed feedback – and get a reply if you want one

Use the ‘Contact’ link at the very bottom of any page, then the link to the ‘GOV.UK form’. Detailed technical queries are directed to HMRC subject matter experts for analysis and to provide a response if you’ve asked for one and provided your contact details. And again, you can do this for other pages on GOV.UK too.”

END OF HMRC MESSAGE.