HMRC Office Closures

Debate between Rebecca Pow and Anne-Marie Trevelyan

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.

Equal Pay and the Gender Pay Gap

Debate between Rebecca Pow and Anne-Marie Trevelyan

Wednesday 1st July 2015 Commons Chamber

[Rebecca Pow (Taunton Deane) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Inverclyde (Ronnie Cowan). I am so pleased to hear that his constituency is open for business and I am delighted that he is living out his early dreams by finally getting into politics. He speaks passionately about his area and I know that he will speak up for it well while he is here. I also want to congratulate the other Members who made maiden speeches today. We had two excellent speeches from the two Bs, Bermondsey and Bury St Edmunds—the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle) and my hon. Friend the Member for Bury St Edmunds (Jo Churchill). I know that they will both be a working part of the operation of this Chamber and I welcome them.

I also want to congratulate everyone who has contributed to today’s debate. I speak as a woman who not only set up my own small business in my constituency some 12 years ago but has juggled work for large companies and corporations, including the National Farmers Union, the BBC and ITV, with family life since leaving university. Yes, that was a long time ago, but all that has happened since. I am now the first female Conservative MP for Taunton Deane, so I have a particular interest in today’s debate, as do many other Members.

I particularly want not to be negative but to highlight that although there might be a long way to go with differences in pay between men and women, we have made enormous strides. More women are in work than ever before, 14.4 million nationally, and there are more women-led businesses than ever before. To prove that point, in Somerset there are 1,957 women members of the Federation of Small Businesses, with 577 of them within the Taunton postcode area.

I want to focus especially on the growing surge in women running their own businesses, which, of course, puts them in control of their own pay. Some 20% of small and medium-sized enterprises are either run by women or are women-heavy—and by that I do not mean anything about weight: I mean, of course, that they are predominantly run by women. SMEs led by women contributed £75 billion to the economy in 2012, which was the latest figure I could find.

In my experience in Taunton Deane and through joining and working with a range of women’s business groups, women-centric businesses are growing and they are successful. The Government must do all they can to enable and encourage those businesses to grow. Let me give just one example of a very successful small business in Taunton Deane. It is called Mastergen and is in a very rural location, in the village of West Bagborough. It is a women-only company made up of six women. The managing director is Alison Dunphy, and I spoke to her earlier for an update on how they are doing. I am pleased to report that the company is doing well. It specialises in supplying quality dairy and beef genetics to farmers throughout the UK. To the uninitiated, that means bull semen, and very important it is too. So successful is the company that turnover has doubled in under nine months and the company won the Taunton business incentive award last year.

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

My hon. Friend’s comments bring me on to an issue that I want to raise. In my constituency of Berwick-upon-Tweed—another B—we are all to a man very proud to support the Bronze family, who have spent years travelling hundreds of miles each week to help their daughter Lucy fulfil her passion for football. That young woman is now kicking winning goals for our England women’s team and hopefully will do so again tonight against Japan. I hope that Members will keep their fingers crossed. Does my hon. Friend agree that we should encourage the lottery sports fund to focus on investing in sports clubs and facilities that are committed to investing in girls’ sports such as cricket and football? I ask because the subject of bull semen leads us to the male sports, and in cricket and football we are seeing spectacular results from our female players—

[Mr Speaker]

We are extremely grateful to the hon. Lady.