Central Government
Beneficial Ownership
How might we bring transparency to find out who really benefits in the UK property market? I was thrilled to lead the team in this GDS Alpha for the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government to find out
Role: Project Director Client: MHCLG Date: 2024
The problem
Figuring out who really benefits from the ownership of property in the UK is difficult, even for the most seasoned expert. We were asked to examine whether we could make this easier with a combination of user centred design, policy design and data modelling.
My role as Project Director was to
Help the team understand the work
Choose an approach that would achieve the project goals
Keep track of the project budget and adjust the delivery to keep us within healthy limits, while still meeting our agreed outcomes
Balance expectations with the client and the team
Keeping everyone up to date on the project progress and health
Listen to the team and help make decisions about scope, approach and risks
Represent the client to the team, and vice versa
Think about the longer term, bigger picture and how this work fits into various strategies and long term plans for government and the departments
This project was a Government Design Service Standard Alpha, using established principles, conventions and components.
What I did
My role on this project was the first formal step into ‘project direction’. The Project Director is the person on the project that holds ultimate responsibility and accountability for the quality of the project, the wellbeing of the team, the happiness of the client and the project budget. Creating the conditions for success is a bit of a cliché, but that’s exactly what this role involves.
Alongside the Design Lead, and Delivery Manager the Project Director completes what we call the ‘Project Leadership Team’, who when working well together hold the tension between achievability, user centricity, and client desires.
Understanding the problem
A large part of my role on projects is creating understanding and alignment. My favourite way to do this is through doodles and diagrams.
Three hypothesese
Three hypotheses
We entered the work around three hypotheses, or questions, which we prioritised with the client. Each hypothesese had a series of riskiest assumptions to help guide us where to prioritise our efforts.
Hypothesis one
We believe that by developing guidance, incentives and penalties for failing to meet beneficial ownership responsibilities beneficial owners:
Will become more aware of their responsibilities / obligations
Will be incentivised to comply to meet their obligations
The goal of the alpha was to prove or disprove these hypotheses. We did this through a mix of UCD methods, policy design and technical deep dives into existing government systems.
Hypothesis two
We believe developing a unique identifier for individual beneficial owners that is used across all existing government registers will:
Enable data matching across registers
Lead to users being able to meet their end goals
Hypothesis three
We believe that by developing a new dedicated register to obtain and provide beneficial ownership information:
Users will be able to meet their end goal without having to navigate a complex system that does not meet their needs
There will be a single source of truth for information regarding beneficial ownership information
Project approach
Because of how much you have to compromise, I find Alphas the trickiest of all the GDS project phases. You don’t get the blank page feeling of a discovery where anything is possible, and you don’t get the rush of building and launching something in a Beta.
We found the compromise that would best meet our outcomes and test our hypotheses was to focus on Service Design, Tech, and Policy. We didn’t focus on Organisation or Product Design.
Policy: We knew for this service to work we needed policy changes to support it, so this was where we focused our work for hypothesis one.
Design: The design of a new register was critical to the success of the project, so this is how to tackled hypothesis three.
Technology: The underlying technology, which will probably be a combination of new tech and existing data sources, underpinned the whole project, so we focused here for hypothesis two.
Key moments
Getting together IRL
I am fully bought in to remote working, and love that I get to work with people all over the country. However bringing people together in person at key moments in a project is priceless. For the policy design part of the work we all met up in London for a productive and insightful workshop, where we were able to fully engage in the work for a full day without the distractions of Slack, email, and election rumours on Twitter.
Taking the decision to pivot
The nature of working in an agile way means being prepared to take decisions when the evidence or constraints require it. To make sure we were able to do our best work I had to make a tricky decision to change our scope mid way through. This was a hard moment for all of us but it ensured the work could be done in the right way, at the right time.
Testing with conveyancers
After designing proposals for policy to support the service we needed find out how they would be received by the people most affected. To do this we convened real property conveyancers, walked them through our plans and asked for their reactions. This was the culmination of all of our work and thankfully they didn’t shy away from telling us what they thought.
The results
We completed the work on schedule, and on budget with our three hypotheses validated, with an established route to take the work to Beta.
We’re awaiting news of future plans from the department but are confident that the need for the work is clear, should the new government wish to prioritise it.
“the in person workshop that you organised with MHCLG, HMLR, HMRC and Companies House was masterfully organised, artfully facilitated and had a fantastic tone”