Welsh Revenue Authority weeknotes

📝 Weeknotes #2 - land and property data proof of concept

Hi all,

Thanks for joining our show and tell earlier, and welcome to the second weeknotes for the land and property data proof of concept. In future, we are hoping to share these more widely, but for now it’s just for the people who came to the show and tell.

A reminder that we are exploring the art of the possible for simpler, fairer, more efficient, devolved land and property taxation in Wales. We want to be ambitious, but humble, and:

Bring the opportunities and challenges to life Give Ministers potential policy options Be clear about the scale of ambition and where to start Demonstrate new ways of working

Working in the open and stakeholders

Meetings have started with key stakeholders to update and/or share plans for the project. We’ve also been finalising copy and translations for the project website and setting up a github organisation for the WRA.

Roadmapping

Agile projects need a roadmap - one that evolves as we learn more through prototyping, workshops and user research. We’ve made a start and the high-level view looks like this:

Screenshot of roadmap - getting setup; understand LTT today; understand localised LTT; understand the needs of local authorities; prototypes; decide what to do next

Worked examples

Each week we are aiming to build out our understanding of the property and land data spine and the types of services it could support. This week our aims were:

Start to show what we mean by a data spine Start to understand what attributes might it need for calculating LTT as it is today Start to explore what attributes localised LTT might require and how we might store the rules as geospatial data

We used Jupyter Notebook, a data science tool, to create a prototype of the data spine containing records of two fictional properties. We then used those records to calculate LTT as it is today, and a theoretical implication of a localised LTT.

Jupyer notebook showing map of wales with two points on Jupyer notebook showing worked example for current LTT Jupyer notebook showing map wales with hypothetical tax zones

Focus for next week

Things we found along the way this sprint