HMRC Office Closures

Stuart C McDonald Excerpts

Tuesday 24th November 2015 Commons Chamber

[Stuart C. McDonald (Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East) (SNP)]

I am pleased to have the opportunity to take part in this debate and to put on record the profound disappointment and, indeed, anger felt by my constituents, who have for years worked incredibly hard at Cumbernauld tax office. I want also to express the huge disquiet felt across the town at these proposals to close down our biggest employer and relocate good-quality jobs elsewhere. All that comes, as other hon. Members have said, with little in the way of explanation and even less in the way of consultation.

On any view at all, the announcement made two weeks ago about the HMRC offices is of enormous significance and has the potential to cause immense disruption to the staff affected, to the communities where those tax offices are currently based and to the services that HMRC provides in collecting taxes. It is astonishing to me that the Government think that such a major announcement does not merit so much as a ministerial statement.

I have received no correspondence from HMRC, so I feel like I have been missed out a little compared with honourable colleagues. However, my colleague Jamie Hepburn MSP received a letter similar to that sent to my hon. Friends, full of vague management-speak rather than information. There were no parliamentary debates until we secured this one. PCS representatives were not consulted on the criteria used by HMRC for site selection or on outline decisions, and they agree with neither. That is not good enough at such a huge moment for HMRC and its staff.

HMRC claims that £100 million of estate savings will be generated each year by 2025, despite not knowing where these brand-new city centre sites will be and how much they will cost. If HMRC has such confidence in the model it proposes, the supposed savings that it will make and the claimed benefits to service standards, it should have nothing to fear from extensive scrutiny, so let us have that extensive scrutiny. Will the Government agree to a full debate on, and scrutiny of these detailed proposals here in Parliament, to both public consultation and full consultation with PCS, and to the pausing of implementation while all that is under way?

To say that the months leading up to the announcement have been a frustrating and worrying time for hard-working and dedicated staff in HMRC offices across the UK would be a grave understatement. Up to 1,600 people in Cumbernauld will be directly impacted once we factor in IT staff provided by contractors, as well as catering and cleaning staff. Most frustratingly, between woolly press releases, vague correspondence and contradictory information at staff meetings, many questions remain unanswered. HMRC’s letter to my colleague Jamie Hepburn, which I think was almost identical to that received by the hon. Member for Wolverhampton South West (Rob Marris) and others, said that

“90% of our current workforce, including the majority of those working for us in your constituency, will be able to either work in a regional centre or see out their career in an HMRC office”.

The hon. Gentleman raised several issues arising from that letter. I would also ask, how big is the majority of staff who will continue to be able to work in HMRC offices? There is a grave lack of clarity.

The Government have said that there will be no compulsory redundancies. Yet, on the other hand, workers in Cumbernauld have been told that no voluntary packages will be available to them. Given that we know that the Government require a cut in the workforce in the west of Scotland in order to fit them in the new office, people are rightly asking whether the Government are seeking to lose staff on the cheap, hoping that they will jump without having properly to compensate them.

Staff also ask whether it is coincidence that rules on acceptable travel distances in the event of relocation have recently been tightened to their detriment and why travel allowances have been limited to three to five years. What about those who already commute from a considerable distance east or north of Cumbernauld, many of whom are closer to Edinburgh? Why are they not being allowed to choose the Edinburgh hub ahead of Glasgow? Will there be options such as home-working or other creative solutions? While measures on retraining and redeployment could be positive, we need to see so much more detail before we can judge how meaningful they are.

Most importantly, people need to know when exactly they will be expected to move. Is it soon, towards the end of the five-year period or some time in between? Is their job moving with them or are they moving to a new job in terms not only of location but of role? HMRC claims that people will be better able to develop careers up to senior levels, but my constituents fear that their good-quality roles will be replaced with poorer quality work.

On so many levels this does not seem a well thought-through plan, and it should go back to the drawing board. What is particularly perplexing in the context of Cumbernauld is that some of the proposed regional centres will hold as few as 1,200 staff. Cumbernauld hosts between 1,500 and 1,600, so why not retain it if that is efficient enough as part of the new model?