Wales collects council tax twenty-two different ways. There’s a better option.

Tim Daley

I spent years in central government doing work that rarely made headlines. Consolidating networks. In-sourcing contracts. Redesigning the operational infrastructure that sits underneath ministerial decisions and determines whether those decisions ever reach the people they were made for.

What that work taught me is that the distance between a good policy and a good outcome is where the hardest problems live. The policy is rarely the problem. The people rarely are either. The problem is almost always in the space between them.

A few years on, one of the clearest places to see this in Wales is how we administer council tax.

Why the gap opens

We keep designing policy in one room and delivery in another and expressing surprise when they don’t meet in the middle. Council tax is one of the places where that pattern has hardened into infrastructure.

Each part of the system has its own logic. Ministers are accountable for decisions. Officials are accountable for advice. Delivery organisations are accountable for operations. The problem is not that any of those accountabilities are wrong. It is that the system was not designed for the people inside them to look at the same thing at the same time.

Closing that gap means designing policy and delivery together, not one after the other. It means users, policymakers and operators looking at the same system, with the same data in front of them, asking the same question early: will this actually work when it reaches the person it is meant to serve? That is not glamorous work. It does not generate press releases. It is the work that makes the press releases true.

Wales has a genuine advantage here. Small enough to design services nationally. Big enough for the effort to matter. The incoming government has a real opportunity to use that advantage. But it requires creating the conditions for users, policy teams and operational teams to work on the same problem at the same time. That is harder than it sounds when accountability structures, budget cycles, and organisational boundaries all pull in different directions.

Council tax is the easiest place to see this

Council tax is the one public service every Welsh household has a direct relationship with. It is also, underneath the surface, one of the clearest illustrations of what happens when policy and operations drift apart over time.

The current system was built in 1993. Much of the infrastructure running it is not far off that age. Thirty-two years of patches, adaptations, and workarounds, each one a reasonable response to the circumstances of the moment, sit underneath a tax that every Welsh household pays. And it runs twenty-two times. Twenty-two councils, twenty-two versions of the same operation, twenty-two delivery paths for what is, from the minister’s and user’s perspective, a single policy.

A resident is not choosing between twenty-two councils. They are living in one. The bill they receive, the process for querying it, the experience of applying for support: all of it depends on postcode in ways that have nothing to do with policy intent and everything to do with infrastructure that accumulated gradually, decision by decision, over three decades.

The Council Tax Reduction Scheme makes this visible. Welsh Government sets uniform eligibility criteria centrally, for around 261,000 low-income households. Every local authority then implements its own version of the same scheme. Policy centralised. Delivery fragmented. That is not a design failure. It is what happens when policy and delivery infrastructure were never quite in the same room.

The Welsh Revenue Authority already exists. Established in 2017, it administers Land Transaction Tax and Landfill Disposals Tax competently and quietly. It is the natural candidate for a central delivery role on council tax. The architecture is a second-order question. The first-order question is whether the conditions exist for policy and operations to be looked at together, rather than in sequence.

In our work with Caerphilly County Borough Council, we found the same pattern inside a single organisation: multiple systems doing versions of the same job, each accumulated through decisions that made sense at the time. The question was never ‘How did we get here?’. It was ‘What would it take to rewire this so that it works for the people it serves?’

The principle is bigger than council tax

Welsh public finances are not getting easier. The most immediate question for an incoming government isn’t whether to reform council tax. It is how to make the existing spend work better. Twenty-two parallel back offices doing versions of the same job is money and capability that could be freeing up people to do work that only people can do. That question is live now, regardless of whether or when wider council tax reform happens.

And it may well be a possibility. It is on the agenda of almost every party heading into May 7th. If it does happen, the same principle applies: policy reform and delivery reform need to be designed together, not treated as separate exercises. Reform the bands and leave the twenty-two back offices as they are, and the resident’s experience of the new policy will be as uneven as their experience of the old one.

The same pattern shows up well beyond council tax. Anywhere policy and operations have drifted apart. Anywhere decisions made centrally are implemented in twenty-two, or forty, or a hundred slightly different ways. Anywhere a system designed for a previous era is being asked to deliver in this one. The opportunity is not to redesign everything at once. It is to identify the places where the gap between policy intent and operational reality is widest, and to bring the right people, users, policymakers and operators, into the same room to look at it together.

This is the kind of work that I know from experience tends to produce durable change. Not a report handed over and forgotten, but work that stays close to implementation – alongside the policy teams, the operators, and the people the service is actually meant to reach.

At Perago, we have done this inside local government, with Welsh public services, and at UK level. The method is not complicated, but getting the right conditions for it can be. Being open to creating those conditions is the real ask of the incoming government.

Tim Daley is Strategy and Transformation Director at Perago, a transformation and change consultancy based in Swansea.