When HMRC announced a new IT system would be rolled out later than expected, it got the usual catcalls. It will take until 31 March 2023 for HMRC’s Customs Declaration Service to completely replace CHIEF (Customs Handling of Import Export Freight) as the UK’s  customs platform. But for once, I’ve got to say hats off HMRC.  When they started to replace CHIEF we were still part of Europe. Once Brexit was declared, they had to amend the Customs Declaration Service to take Brexit into account, even though the Government couldn’t make up its mind if, when and how we were leaving Europe. The fact that we’re only talking about late completion of CDS, when bits of it are already in place is a miracle. Just don’t expect the cost increase to be written on the side of a bus. In the past HMRC software projects had a pretty good reputation. When King and Crewe covered Information Technology in ‘The Blunders of Our Government’ (2013) they admitted that not all government IT schemes h...

  A common sense suggestion to merge civil servants and council officers could be the start of cuts to local authorities. Baron Bichard, writing in the latest Civil Service World suggests scrapping distinctions between civil servants, council officers and NHS staff and creating a unified public service. The argument, on behalf of “the Commission for Smart Government” makes sense.  If you have one public service, it will smash the bureaucratic boxes which make it hard to solve real-life problems. Michael Bichard hints that last year’s PPE crisis would have had a happier ending if – instead of lots of agencies around the country – there had been just one public service. https://www.civilserviceworld.com/in-depth/article/time-to-end-the-great-divide-lets-scrap-distinctions-between-civil-servants-council-officers-and-nhs-staff And of course, Michael Bichard was the first chief executive of a county council to be put in charge of a government agency (the Benefits Agency).  So ...

 Even Little Jack Horner would have trouble finding anything good in the Brexit pie , but one plum might be the UK Global Tariff, which replaces the EU’s Common External Tariff. If you’ve never had to import or export anything (let’s face it, that’s most of us) the Tariff is the list of the Commodity Codes for every product you might want to bring in, together with the potential rate of customs duty. Praise Mona, I never had much to do with customs duty in my day-to-day work with HMRC. I used the Tariff more to decide if products were liable to Excise Duty. If that sounds double-dutch, just remember it was the EU’s tariff! More on that later. Being British, the UK Tariff has been made easier than the EU Tariff. For a start, everything is calculated in pounds, rather than Euro’s. Percentages have been rounded down. “Nuisance tariffs” have been eliminated under the thinking that anything under 2.5% is so low it costs more to collect than the tax it brings in.  A whopping 47% of ...