Eaves (pictured) set up Whitehall’s first Insight unit in 2002, having joined as head of behavioural evidence and insight in 2001 from My.net International where he was head of market research.

He said the role of customer understanding and market research has changed considerably during his time at HMRC. “HMRC’s strategy now states explicitly that we start with the customer, we have director level leads for our different customer groups, satellite insight teams embedded in our different lines of business and an executive customer committee chaired by our chief executive,” he said.

He recently worked with The Chartered Institute for IT to set up the UK’s first accreditation of User Researchers, driven by HMRC wanting to recognise the importance of trained researchers working on digital services development.

Eaves said: “I’m leaving HMRC because I’ve done what I set out to do here and it’s a good time to move on to other hard challenges. I’m will be doing some freelance consultancy and charity work in the digital and research space and will continue my relationship with the Market Research Society.”

A generalist senior civil servant has taken over the role while the future management and structure of the team is still to be decided.