HMRC Office Closures

Anne-Marie Trevelyan Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Mrs Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)]

As a newly elected member of the Public Accounts Committee, I recently had the opportunity to look closely at HMRC’s efforts to increase the amount of tax it collects and how it plans to do better. Our latest report, published on 3 November, made it clear that it is our opinion that HMRC has continued to fail in its customer service standards, and that if it is to collect much more of the tax due to the Treasury, modern, fit-for-purposes systems that support the Government’s “Digital by default” agenda must be in place.

At the moment, HMRC’s 58,000 employees are spread across 170 offices, many a legacy of the 1960s and 1970s. Their staff numbers range from fewer than 10 to some 6,000 people. To meet the customer service standards and increase tax revenues, the service needs to be providing its customers with modern services, at a lower cost to the taxpayer. As the Minister mentioned, this year HMRC recruited 3,000 additional staff to customer-facing teams. Those staff are providing services in the evenings and at weekends, building capacity outside normal working hours, which helps the taxpayer who is trying to sort out her tax payments. That is a great step forward: a major government body is changing its working practices to meet its customer demand. Many more customers now want to work out their tax payments online, at a time of their choosing. HMRC’s investment in digital services, simpler and more user-friendly portals and work with accountancy software designers to make small business financial packages automatically link into HMRC’s reporting systems is freeing up staff to deal with more complex tax problems.

[Rebecca Pow]

Are not 80% of customers already filling in their tax forms online? That proves exactly what my hon. Friend has been saying about modernising being the right approach.

[Mrs Trevelyan]

I thank my hon. Friend for her intervention, because what she says is exactly right. We have to be mindful of that situation as HMRC moves forward in this digital world. HMRC collected £518 billion from UK taxpayers in 2014-15, an increase of £12 billion on the previous year. Over the past five years, a continuously increasing tax take has been matched by a reduction in running costs from £3.4 billion to £3.1 billion. I believe the Chancellor is totally committed to supporting HMRC to do its job better, and the Budget in July gave it a further £800 million to invest in compliance work over the next five years and collect an additional £7 billion in tax take.

There will, however, remain a tax gap, and challenging and overcoming that will continue to need the most modern systems and highly qualified staff. In search of such, the move to modern, regional centres across the UK will bring together the skills and the efficiency of resource and talents to maximise tax collection. HMRC expects the majority of its existing staff to be able to move to the regional centres, with a 10-year phasing to minimise redundancies. There will eventually be a modern, digitised organisation with fewer staff, but I have every hope that the programme of change is being well managed—I will be continuing to monitor it, as will the PAC.

I have some concerns about the regional centre plans. For example, I question the need for two London-based sites, in Stratford and Croydon, given that there is no base in East Anglia, where I would have thought running costs were lower. In the north-east, we already have a major HMRC centre at Longbenton in Newcastle, which supports a wide variety of tax-collecting divisions. The changes in staffing levels and working hours are starting to improve customer service there, and it is key that we make sure HMRC maximises the investment in its quality of staff and effectiveness across the UK to get the maximum benefit. HMRC’s modernisation of its efficiency and digital service provision is vital if the service is to continue to reduce that tax gap in order to help us to pay for the public services—the goodies, as the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Rob Marris) called them—we all want to see, to transform its services to customers and to be able to clamp down further on the minority who are still trying to cheat the system.