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Ten Years of Building Our Future

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  April 2024 marks ten years since HM Revenue and Customs breathlessly introduced their “national conversation” called “Building our Future.” Unveiled by chief executive Linda Homer, the one-sided conversation outlined the future shape of HMRC. Government had set priorities to maximise tax revenue, improve services and reduce costs. “We are going to put customers at the heart of everything we do. That means redesigning our processes around them, rather than the taxes they pay or benefits they receive.” Digitisation would automate many processes, cutting the need for some roles. ”We will continue to reduce in size and become even more highly skilled, and we will further consolidate into a small number of very large workplaces or Regional Centres.” “We think it’s an exciting future, but we know it won’t be for everyone.” It was followed up in November 2014 by “Building our Future 2: Continuing the Conversation.”  This led off with some finger-wagging from Linda Homer. “We’ve picked up th
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Boris Johnson - Bosferatu! The vampire heart of Covid

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Boris Johnson used to joke that he admired the Mayor in Jaws because – a few people may have been killed – but at least he kept the beaches open. But the Covid enquiry reminds us that he’s closer to Dracula. In the Bram Stoker’s novel., newly qualified solicitor Jonathan Harker is sent to Castle Dracula by his employer Peter Hawkins, who has been buying a London property on Dracula’s behalf. Hawkins claims in his letter of introduction that an attack of gout prevents him from travelling but Dracula is already aware of the substitution (“I bid you welcome, Mr Harker,” he says) and Harker already suspects that the muffled coach driver who brought him to the castle might have been Dracula in disguise. Hawkins’ letter ominously introduces Harker as “full of energy…very faithful.” In  a Westminster context Hawkins appears to be throwing Harker under the bus.  The unofficial silent film Nosferatu merges the characters of Hawkins and Renfield making it clear that Harker’s employer was a Dracu
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Jonathan Harker - Exciseman

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 I always thought that in Bram Stoker’s novel DRACULA, Jonathan Harker would have made a good excise officer. The way he follows the audit trail of Dracula's coffins from Whitby to Carfax and then out to Bermondsey and Piccadilly. Contents misdescribed as "common earth" when actually "undead-nurturing." What penalty would that attract? Just to lay out the facts; In the novel Dracula arrives on a Russian schooner, the Demeter, which is wrecked on the Whitby shore. The vessel has a small cargo of “wooden boxes filled with mould” which Dracula has consigned to a local solicitor called Billington.  Pre-Brexit, this would have been a simple EU excise move from Bulgaria to the UK, although it would now be a customs arrival from the EU. Either way, there’s a fair degree of misdescription in the papers. When Harker visits Billington’s office in Whitby he sees an invoice for, “fifty cases of common Earth to be used for experimental purposes.”  As we later learn, the eart
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Mortise-and-Tenon Monday

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 Glancing at an old diary over the weekend, I realised that if I'd still been working for HMRC, today would have been a Mortise-and-Tenon Monday. Named after the old sliding games that preceded Rubik's Cube, and challenged line managers to squeeze a United Nations level of co-ordination into the working day. This was one of the many benefits of "Working in the Office." There was always re-organisation - especially in a processing unit. Every year a new strategy would be drawn up, new initiatives championed. Teams would be broken up, with their functions assigned to new managers. And since everyone was sitting at a desk with a computer, that would often mean people moving with their computers to a new desk. In the pre-Surface Pro days that meant picking up the base unit, keyboard and screen (together with desk drawers and contents) and wheeling them on a chair to the new base. But that was just the planned re-organisation. Sometime during the year, managers would reali
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Staff Appraisal: the big middle rank of “Good”

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 The first time I ventured into line management for HM Customs and Excise (as was), my outgoing manager made me a gift of a 1973 civil service textbook on staff reporting. As I’d always been the schoolboy, creeping like snail to appraisals, he obviously thought I needed the help. Even though HMCE (and later HMRC) had training materials, I don’t think any of it rivalled the clarity and unsentimentality of the 1973 booklet. Published by the Personnel Management (Training) Division of the Civil Service Department, it was an attempt to standardise Staff Reporting throughout the Civil Service. 750 draft copies were tested at all grades and departments before the programmed textbook was issued. While self-instruction was a new concept viewed with suspicion in comparison to formal learning, given time and staff hours the booklet judged the best way to roll the system out to over 150,000 reporting officers. The booklet sets out the general principles that staff reporting allows the organisatio
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They're All Mad You Know

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 Coming back from my world cruise on the S.S. Happy Wanderer, I told myself that my knowledge of HM Revenue and Customs was now far too time-expired (our "out of date" as we used to say). But setting foot on English shores once more, I soon found that the likes of Jacob Rees Mogg were still trotting out the same old prejudices about civil servants, productivity and working from home. That's one good thing about starting from a base of no knowledge. It can never go out of date.  According to The Times of 10 January, MP's such as Harriet Baldwin of the Treasury committee have written to Jim Harra ( head of HMRC) after helplines were shut down last month due to IT problems. Despite being told that the shutdown was due to "a botched upgrade", the MP's still want to know , "if its working from home policy has caused a decline in its customer service helpline." Of course, Jim Harra will give them an answer. And they probably won't be satisfied wi
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HMRC's School Report - See me at the end of the lesson

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  HMRC released its Annual Report for 2022 last month. Some embittered highlights: “Our locations strategy, announced in 2015, remains key to enabling delivery of all our departmental objectives. Of around 170 ageing HMRC offices…154 have now closed to employees, including 20 during 2021 to 2022.” For those employees who didn’t want to move to one of the new city centre offices (often outside of reasonable daily travel) the cost of exit packages was £82,265,000 in 2020-21 and £14,306,000 in 2021-22. In a separate item, the cost of “Contingent labour” (temporary staff) rose from £82 million in 2020-21 to £170 million in 2021-22. A bargain. “Terms and Conditions have been restructured and modernised to make it easier to deploy colleagues to where they’re most needed to meet customer demand…providing greater fairness and increasing workforce productivity.” That was what staff agreed to (via the union) in order to get their long-delayed pay rises. The sickness absence levels are interest
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