Welsh Revenue Authority weeknotes

📝 Weeknotes #10 - land and property data proof of concept

Hello and welcome to the end of week 10 of the land and property data proof of concept and thanks to those of you who joined our show and tell on Monday.

A reminder that we are exploring how the WRA can support geographically varied land and property taxes and if a data platform for land and property in Wales could also be the foundation for something more. We want to:

⌨️ Making the words do the work - documentation to explain the platform

Following from the research last week, we’ve been putting some effort into how the platform explains what it does and who it is for. We’ve also been borrowing lots of best practice from the likes of GOV.UK Pay, Cloud.gov and pagopa.gov.it (good platforms explain what they do and lower the barrier to getting started). We’ve added the following sections: features, getting started and roadmap. We’ve also added a section for analysts so it is clear it is a source of data, not a replacement for data science tools.

Platform website showing the new getting started page

🧩 Data model and API

We’ve been moving towards a data model that is less opinionated and can handle ambiguity and uncertainty, and can expand over time. Example API response showing multiple attributes against a property

We’ve also been using the Open Data Institute’s data spectrum as a starting point for how we think about data access. Some data, such as tax payer data would never be accessible via a platform and would remain closed. In the future, some data might be shared with local government. While other datasets, such as tax rates, would be available via the platform as open data.

Example spectrum - tax records closed, second home status accessed by a local authority, tax zones as open data

🏕 Tourism speculative prototyping

Following the tourism workshop last week, we did some early speculative prototyping. The aim was to help to illustrate the role of a platform and the types of services it might support. As with localised Land Transaction Tax, it seems we can usefully surface the information in different places.

3 prototypes of services for business owners and one of a sticker aimed at the public where they can see how money is spent near by

A reminder: we are not designing the services themselves, they are just tools to help us think through the problem. Policies around tourism are still under early development. They also help us to explain the idea of platforms supporting multiple services, identifying where hard design problems might lie and helped us think about hypotheses for future research and we imagine using these as stimulus material for that.

đź“ś Policy patterns

Finally, we held a workshop to review the policy patterns we developed the other week. One piece of feedback was to explain them in the context of the principles for Welsh taxes.

Policy patterns

đź—“ Focus for next week

Each week, we set out what we want to learn or do, and what hypotheses we think we need to test. This week, we are hoping to …

📑 Things we found along the way on this sprint…