Criss Cross - HMRC and Civil Servants Shunted Across the Country

 


Bruno: "You like my theories? You think they're okay?"

Guy: "Sure, Bruno. They're all okay!"

Senior Managers in the Civil Service must  often feel like Guy Haines in "Strangers On A Train" , going along with Bruno Antony's whimsical rambling and then suddenly realising they've committed themselves to a course of action that can only end in disaster. 

Government departments are boasting they're going to shift posts out of London to level up the regions, at the same time as HM Revenue and Customs has been shutting down offices in the regions in order to move posts into the cities. Criss Cross, as Bruno would say.

Things weren't much different back in 2005, when HM Customs and Excise and the Inland Revenue merged into  HM Revenue and Customs. The Civil Service was being measured up for surgery by the efficiency experts Gershon and Lyons. Peter Gershon prescribed resources being redirected to "the frontline", while academic Michael Lyons' complementary therapy was resources being decentralised from London to the regions.

HM Customs and Excise chairman Richard Broadbent had already carried out some fast-footwork. Whether it's in the public or private sector, the first jobs to be cut are the low-hanging fruit of the 'Back Office Jobs' .  Always a popular move with politicians, directors and the public because most people don't know what happens in a 'Back Office' and think you can get away with cutting those jobs without any loss in productivity.

So Broadbent masterminded a scheme to shift the 'Back Office workers' into the 'Front Office'. Using 'New Technology', everyone would now book their own leave and train tickets, while their line managers carried out all the related administration previously done in the mysterious back office. Meanwhile, the staff freed up from admin tasks would be redeployed at "the sharp end". It was nasty for regional HR staff who found their jobs being sucked into a Liverpool Call Centre - especially if the replacement job at "the sharp end" was a lower-skilled and less interesting one. But the Broadbent Three Card Monte probably saved a lot of jobs when the Government came looking for efficiencies.

(And before someone says - "that's obvious! Standard business practice" or whatever. Well it wasn't obvious in 2003. And it didn't seem to have occurred to the Pukka Sahibs of the Inland Revenue, who rolled up to the HMRC party with their old structure in place.)

Almost as soon as the green paint was dry on the new HMRC logo, former HMCE directors were implementing the Lyons recommendations, shunting jobs in the National Advice Service and Debt Management out of the capital into the regions. Maybe it was because they knew it was another three card trick. London had been understaffed and starved of IT improvements for years. As soon as one work area went out of the door, there was plenty of backlogged work from another work area to keep the staff occupied. 

And the long term plan over the next ten years was always to cut heads. With IT promising miracles, it was argued that there was less reason for HMRC to have an office in every town, or every region. So, the "front office" staff, who were already doing less because everyone was sharing the "back office" tasks, could now be cut back because their work could be automated. And even if that automation wasn't quite working yet, that was no reason not to reap the benefits by cutting the posts before the automation was ready. So around 35,000 staff went in the ten years up to 2015.

But it seems that HMRC has now come to a point where it's got as many staff as it needs. And, in the most recent phase of the "Building Our Future" programme, in which all HMRC work is concentrated on thirteen City hubs, senior management has allegedly been surprised at the numbers of experienced staff who refused to move to the cities and opted for redundancy. I'm not surprised they've been surprised. As someone once said, Building Our Future is , "a plan put together by people in London, for whom and hour and a half commute each way is a regrettable fact of life if you want to live somewhere bigger than a rabbit hutch.  Outside of London, however, the work/life balance is different."

To put it another way - most of the decisions that affect lower grade Civil Servants are made by people who have very different lives. Senior Managers who view life changing moves as necessary, even desirable and politicians who are, in the words of Robin Day, "Here today, gone tomorrow." 



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