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 inte...