Transition of the HMRC website to GOV.UK

22 December, 2014

Stamp Taxes and ATED guidance for our customers is moving from the HMRC website to GOV.UK on 18^th Dec.

This note explains why that’s happening and what it will mean for you.

Moving our website – and why we are doing it

Government is changing – to become ‘digital by default’. A big part of that is moving all public-facing government websites to just one site at www.gov.uk. Most departments have already made this ‘transition’ to GOV.UK – now it’s the turn of our website to do the same.

Moving to GOV.UK

We will transition all of our customer guidance, including calculators, forms, manuals, email alerts etc.

We’re creating lots of new content and modifying existing material too, to make things simpler, clearer and faster for our customers to use. But we won’t be editing our manuals, notices or other technical guidance from the HMRC Library. When these move to GOV.UK the words will be the same but the pages will be presented in a way which makes them easier to search, browse, view and print.

We’ll make sure nothing gets lost during this transition. We’ll also ensure that anyone trying to access a page on the HMRC site which has already moved, gets automatically redirected to the new page on GOV.UK.

HMRC’s existing online services – the ones customers need to sign into, such as the Stamp Taxes Online Service, Self Assessment, Corporation Tax, – won’t change as a result of transition. But our customers will now access them from GOV.UK. There may be some changes to how they look – such as adding the GOV.UK logo. In the longer term, these services will be completely transformed and will join our forthcoming exemplar services on GOV.UK.

Not moving to GOV.UK

Any content that doesn’t move to GOV.UK – because there’s no longer a current need for it – will still be available to customers on the National Archives website.

The following products will not be moving to GOV.UK at the same time as the customer guidance – we’ll link back to the HMRC website for these until they’re ready to come across to GOV.UK.

• Stamp Taxes manuals
• Stamp taxes calculators (tools) –

– Stamp Duty Land Tax Calculator for freehold transactions or assigned leases

– SDLT on lease transactions

–  Stocks and Shares calculator (currently not working – known issue)

User journeys to these calculators are in place from the relevant GOV.UK guides.

• Stamp Taxes Online content that is service specific e.g. What details do I need to register (sign up) for the Stamps Taxes Online service? and What happens if I have forgotten my Stamp Taxes Online Reference Number (STORN)?

What this will mean for our customers

From 17^th Dec customers trying to access this guidance on the HMRC website, for example using a bookmarked link, will be automatically redirected to the appropriate page on GOV.UK. Customers will of course notice the change and at first some may want you to confirm that GOV.UK is the correct website for them to use. Over the coming weeks and months more of our letters and IVR messages etc. will be updated to include GOV.UK links, so customers should quickly become familiar with the new site.

GOV.UK is designed to work primarily via search, both from search tools such as Google, Yahoo and Bing and from the search box on GOV.UK itself. So the things customers search for most should be very easy for them to find and are written in a way that should make sense to customers with no previous knowledge of the subject. This content then links to more detailed information should the customer need that.

What you need to do

Our aim is that this work should have no impact on HMRC’s customers – you and your clients shouldn’t need to do anything except start to use our guidance on GOV.UK.

But you can choose to get involved and help us to make sure the content and tools we develop meet your needs. All pages on GOV.UK include a link (near the bottom of the page) for you to tell us if there’s

something that isn’t working well for you and the GOV.UK feedback form can accessed using the link below (and it can also be found in the ‘Contact’ area of GOV.UK).

https://www.gov.uk/contact/govuk

More information

You can find out more about transition and keep up to date with what we’re doing by signing up for email alerts on the GOV.UK transition blog.

And there’s more on the future of our online services on the digital transformation blog