Monday 5 October 2015

Diamonds Are Forever! - HMRC Becomes Diamond Shaped


In August I wrote that HMRC had bought some land in Stratford wrt HMRC's plans for hubs.

Moving forward to the present, my thanks to a loyal reader who advised me that HMRC is likely to reduce its office capacity from 170 offices at present, to around a dozen regional centres in five years.

A few "transitional sites" will continue a little longer, presumably because there are too many staff there now for HMRC to be able to afford to pay them off.

Announcements to the staff will take place region by region from 10th to 19th November.

A message sent to HMRC staff by HMRC's chief people officer William Hague this week (seen by Civil Service World) says the "overwhelming majority" of employees will be moved to the regional offices as smaller units are closed, and sets out plans for a series of more limited "transitional sites" to allow some staff to continue to work locally. 

As per Hague:
"These changes are one of the biggest building blocks of our transformation, as we simply can't transform the way that we serve the public without fundamentally changing how and where we work.

That's because the way that we're currently organised, across 170 offices, simply doesn't make business or financial sense. It makes it hard for us to collaborate, develop people, or respond to operational priorities – and has created a position where we have isolated pockets of colleagues who have limited career opportunities. 

The only way that we can change this is by rationalising our estate. Our estate contracts are structured in such a way that we need to act now. The alternative would involve us being forced to keep deteriorating buildings that we can do little about.
Loyal readers with long memories may recall that HMRC has estate contracts (around 60% of HMRC's estate is contracted to Mapeley) with Mapeley (feel free to search this site for details about Mapeley).

The good news is that, according to Homer, HMRC is on a course to become more

"diamond-shaped"

Whatever that means?

Tax does have to be taxing.

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9 comments:

  1. They announced all this years ago probably as far back as 2011 it was always the plan to have reduced to 16 offices by 2020.

    It has been on the intranet for years which 16 offices they intended to keep and there were none in Lincolnshire & East Anglia,

    If I remember rightly the offices intended for retention where Cumbernauld, Newcastle, Washington, Manchester, Leeds, Bradford, Birmingham, Cardiff, Southampton, Portsmouth, Bristol and a few in London.

    So this is old news just being brought back as the final annoucement to be made.

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  2. Diamond shaped - what a gem of a description for a multifaceted, multifunctionally disorganised department!

    A leaner, flexible and more quickly deployable workfarce, neither connected with its staff or its taxpayers/customers.

    There must be a few sweepstakes going on in there at the moment;
    How long has Homer got?
    What poor sods will see her at the top of their organisation?
    What will Pacesetter be replaced with, IIP2, common cure, common sense?

    No change then.

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  3. Belfast? I hope it goes, the Custom House is a beautiful building and should belong to the people of that city, rather than the Inland Revenue muppets who destroyed it in 2005.

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    Replies
    1. .....love your thinking...lose hundreds of jobs in Belfast just so you can have a beautiful building to look at.....muppet !!

      Delete
    2. Well said!
      Custom House, Belfast is a very nice building, but the people who work in it, both the many former C&E and former IR staff who are working in it don't deserve to be shed to preserve a building.

      Delete
    3. How about moving the Inland Revenue people out of the Custom House, (Most of the Custom and Excise people were forced out in 2009). These Revenue people, many of them senior managers, could be housed in various empty office buildings around Belfast.
      Charles Lanyons Custom House could then be converted to a beautiful Italian Renaissance style hotel, restaurant. Jobs and investment created in one go. The whole thing would fit in with the regeneration of that part of the city.

      Mapley own the building so I guess its up to them.

      What do you say muppet @ 15:34.

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    4. You certainly don't seem to like people whose careers started in Inland Revenue. I think maybe you're missing one important point.

      Whether we liked it or not, or considered it a good or a bad thing, after the merger people were not either Customs & Excise people or Revenue people - they are HMRC people. Over-simplistic I know but clinging to the idea of one part being somehow inferior to the other is hardly constructive.

      I recall many "Revenue" people feeling they were "pushed into" Custom House, as opposed to C&E staff being pushed out to accommodate them.
      And turning Custom House into a posh hotel isn't going to preserve its character nor mean it will belong to the people of Belfast.

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    5. Well summed up @09.40....
      What is your beef @2.18 ?...is it senior management in the old Inland Revenue..the loss of a lovely building....or just the Inland Revenue as a whole ?

      Don't tar all of the Inland Revenue with the same brush....we are on the same sinking ship ;(

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  4. Now this is spooky.
    The profile shape of HMRC as observed from a Government Survey of headcounts by department is less like a diamond and more like the cross-section of the F117 (Nighthawk) stealth fighter!
    See;
    https://twitter.com/GavinFreeguard/status/641954092898717696/photo/1

    Off we go into the wild blue yonder...

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