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How HMRC adopted innovative partnerships to secure new data talent and reduce consultant costs
HMRC strengthened its internal engineering capability and reduced its reliance on contractors by fast tracking talent into roles through an innovative skills partnership
HMRC wanted to strengthen its critical Data Platform Services (DPS) team but faced a hiring challenge. Strict security processes in this space meant the organisation could not fully describe the specialised role requirements until after candidates were cleared, making traditional hiring pathways slow and challenging.
To break this cycle, HMRC partnered with Equal Experts who engaged the specialist delivery consultancy Counter (a subsidiary of Northcoders). Counter finds the right people to embed with client teams to deliver valuable outcomes and enables those people to transition into permanent client roles. This unique model means there are no barriers to the team staying with the client longer term, reducing hiring costs and enabling the flow of talent into client organisations.
Unlike traditional entry-level schemes, this partnership targets accelerated engineering talent. Partnering with Equal Experts, who brought in Counter, gives HMRC access to a ‘tier 2’ pathway of Northcoders candidates who are often career-switchers with advanced backgrounds. These candidates undergo Northcoders’ rigorous, industry-led, Ofsted Outstanding rated technology bootcamp. They then complete a bespoke training programme tailored to HMRC’s specific tech stack. This ensures candidates arrive ready to perform at a high standard.
Counter provided DPS with consultants selected from Northcoders’ data and cloud engineering programmes who worked alongside an experienced tech lead. The tech lead’s role is to ensure that the Counter teams are technically and strategically aligned to HMRC’s mission and up-skilled to deliver within the relevant technology stack, working practices and ceremonies.
Since 2016 Northcoders has been developing a new generation of diverse technical problem solvers. Through their Tech Returners brand, they also help experienced professionals re-enter the tech industry after a career break, giving them access to higher SFIA level candidates when required. They have produced more than 5,000 technologists and placed them into the UK tech market, supporting 500 organisations across a wide range of sectors.
As a result of this partnership, the team delivered immediate impact by automating manual platform checks, clearing service backlogs and improving service responsiveness.
In addition, they improved operational responsiveness and transitioned people into permanent roles with HMRC, building long-term, in-house expertise and reducing reliance on contractors. This ultimately delivered significant annual savings in infrastructure and staffing costs.
Outcomes
Significant
annual cost savings through proactive data housekeeping and stale log deletion
96% reduction
in manual platform check times, from four hours to just eight minutes – freeing up staff to focus on higher value work to support customers.
Zero backlog
achieved for the first time in Jira and ServiceNow incident queues
About HMRC
HMRC (His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs) is the UK’s tax, payments, and customs authority. The Data Platform Services (DPS) division manages HMRCs critical data platforms, providing data access for internal teams and managing massive data clusters, which support policy and operational decision-making.
Industry
Government & Public Sector
Organisation size
Managing nearly 1 petabyte of data
Location
UK
Project length
October 2023 – March 2025
Challenge
Overcoming security hurdles and legacy manual processes
HMRC faced a complex hiring bottleneck where security clearance delays meant they couldn’t share tech stack details with candidates until they were cleared, but the organisation faced challenges to hire without defining specific roles. At the start of this initiative, HMRC had a small team of permanent data engineers across the department, creating a reliance on external suppliers.
Operationally, the critical data platform support team was constrained by legacy processes. A daily platform health check, unchanged since 2018, required engineers to manually run through a four-hour checklist each morning.
Furthermore, relying on a single team of Linux administrators led to a significant backlog in ServiceNow and Jira queues, where access requests often faced six-week delays.
This high-pressure environment meant Equal Experts and HMRC needed to ensure an appropriate support structure was in place ready for using bootcamp graduates.
Solution
A partnership that reduces cost and improves quality
Equal Experts designed the partnership to be deliberately cost-neutral for the supplier, and to provide a clear incubation period where new talent could be mentored by senior colleagues. By removing contractual barriers and ‘finder’s fees’ for permanent hires, the partnership helped HMRC to adhere to Civil Service recruitment rules while securing the strongest possible candidates.
Counter introduced an experienced technical lead and two engineers from Northcoders’ Data and Cloud programmes. The team quickly began identifying improvement opportunities across the platform. Within two weeks of joining, the team had moved from documentation review into active delivery.
Key implementation steps included:
- Automation of daily platform checks: Within three weeks, the team worked with HMRC colleagues to identify inefficiencies and automated the 4-hour manual checklist to less than 8 minutes.
- Unified operation visibility: Created a consolidated task banner using Teams and Power Automate to aggregate four separate ticket systems into a single view. This allowed the team to view immediate notifications rather than checking multiple systems.
- Common interface: Rather than disrupting existing workflows, they implemented a common interface that would work with current tools like Jira and Helpdesk, ensuring lasting improvements without frictions
- Knowledge sharing culture: Helped establish a culture of post-ticket debriefs to share expertise across the wider DPS support team and prevent specialised knowledge ending up in silos, shifting the team dynamic from specialised silos to a multidisciplinary approach (data, cloud, platform), reducing single points of failure.
The team successfully overhauled the request system, working with HMRC colleagues to understand what we were improving access for, and how to make better informed decisions around relevance.
Results
Tangible savings and sustainable in-house capability
The collaboration delivered immediate operational improvements and significant financial savings. By identifying and removing stale log files and unused data, the team removed unnecessary storage usage, generating significant savings for HMRC
Operational performance also improved dramatically. Access requests that used to take six weeks can now be processed the same day, improving service for internal users. Automating the daily platform health check reduced manual effort, cutting the process from four hours to just under eight minutes. Both of which freed up colleagues to focus on more high value work to support customers.
The team proved highly capable of handling varied incident management work while proactively identifying opportunities to improve platform operations. Their enthusiasm led them to tackle additional tasks, such as sorting through fragmented processes and ensuring every solution was well documented.
The ultimate success of the model was seen on March 2nd 2026, when the Counter Consultants transitioned into permanent roles with HMRC. This delivered several long-term benefits:
- Reduced costs: HMRC transitioned from paying high daily contractor rates to standardised Civil Service salaries, significantly reducing long-term taxpayer burden.
- Improved outcomes: The new engineers were recognised for their performance by colleagues.
- Knowledge retention: HMRC gained engineers who gained experience inside DPS/EDH ways of working, ensuring that the core operational knowledge remains in-house rather than with external contractors.
- Operational ownership: The data platform is now more HMRC owned, with internal staff capable of continuously improving core processes.
The team is continuing to find new ways of improving platform stability and efficiency, including identifying configuration tweaks to improve HDFS access times, and advising stakeholders on the best approaches to access responsible data.