Boris Johnson's latest challenge to Ministers to cut 91,000 Civil Service jobs continues a trend that strikes at the heart of Britain. Following on from the National Insurance rise clumsily tagged to "supporting the NHS" on payslips, the 91,000 job cuts will supposedly free up cash to tackle the cost-of-living crisis.  As usual, it appeals to a certain mentality. One that used to think most Civil Servants are sitting in Whitehall, clocking up "Gold Plated Pensions" and now think they are sitting at home, "skiving off" (or alternately working hard churning out meaningless red tape, depending on which axe you're grinding). Like the Ministers themselves, that mentality doesn't actually know what the Civil Servants are doing. It doesn't know that a lot of them work outside Whitehall, and it doesn't know that a lot of them are so lowly paid that they qualify for in-work benefits. To be fair though, the Government has been doing its best to...

  Mogg, following in the soggy footsteps of the shoe-chewing Francis Maude, wants to cut civil service jobs. Like most of his ilk, he doesn’t know what those civil servants do, or what the effect of cutting them would be. He just wants them gone. Mogg also thinks everyone should be working in the office. Give him his due – it’s not just the oiks that he wants back in the office – as Father of the House, he ordered MP’s back to Parliament and vetoed online debates, in 2020 when the Pandemic was at its height. The reasons Mogg gave were to  “restore the cut and thrust of debate” and to “set an example to the rest of the country.”  You might ask what kind of example the Commons sets for the country with their “cut and thrust” – or Bash Street Kids barracking – but you can at least see that Mogg is consistent. As a Conservative, he wants things to stay like they’ve always been. So, no surprise that at the end of April, he crept round Civil Service offices leaving “Sorry I Mis...

  In the past few weeks, as refugees are turned away and charity shipments to the Ukraine get stalled at the borders because they don’t have customs paperwork, the term “jobsworth” has been slung around at the Home Office, Border Force and HMRC (and private contractors).  Now that things have calmed down a bit, it’s made me look back at being a “jobsworth”. I’ve just done a bit of research and found that the term became popular in the 1970’s when Esther Rantzen used to present a “Jobsworth of the Week” award on her TV show, That’s Life. The idea seems to be that a “jobsworth” is not just someone who rigidly applies the rules (as their contract of employment requires) but that they gleefully take the most rigid and obstructive interpretation of those rules, just to make life difficult. A lot of the folk who shout “jobsworth” do it when they’re wound up. Give them five minutes to calm down, and they’d admit it was unreasonable. But there are others who seem to have a Donald Trum...

Fed up of waiting for a reply? Not satisfied with the service you got? Will making a complaint solve your problem? It might do, IF your complaint is about something that can be fixed. But, the more punters complain, the more it takes people away from their day-to-day work.  It might be that complaints are over-rated. Punters who get their problems fixed by complaining are more likely to recommend it as a solution. But, from what I remember, for every complaint where there was a problem that could be solved, there was another where the only answer was that HRMC had done everything right. You may not like the way it was done, but if it was done within the rules, that was the end of it. (Hand on heart, when I worked for Large Business , I don't recall any complaints. Maybe I was lucky, or maybe it was because each business had a Customer Relationship Manager they could ring up to talk things over with. Maybe that sounds unfair.  Maybe the man in the street could do with having so...

  With the end of ‘Working from Home’ announced, I reckon it will mark the return of one of the biggest hidden sources of work-based stress – staff toilets. Homeworkers have had months, sometimes years, being able to go when they want, in the comfort of their own surroundings. And now they’ll have to readjust to fitting in with the patterns of their management and colleagues in an alien environment. There are three main Toilet problems: engineering, intrapersonal and managerial. Engineering: Architects and engineers always underestimate the demands of the great British public. Think of the magnificent art galleries and museums you’ve visited. The toilets never match up. They used to be just scruffy and inadequate, but since the millennium they’ve been ‘cool’ and inadequate (e.g. wash basins shaped like a clam shell that spray water all over you as soon as you trigger the high powered faucet). HMRC used to have a large estate made up of a hodgepodge of buildings, built in different ...

  I was lucky enough to spend some of my career in HM Revenue and Customs working in Large Business. As I’ve said here , HMRC was a lot like a collection of small villages. But some villages are always more select than others.  Working on the principle of allocating risk to resource, HMRC (and before it the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise) concentrated a proportionate slice of its attention on the 200-or-so businesses responsible for the biggest pot of tax.  It’s not that there were a lot of staff in Large Business; just that in proportion, compared to the staff dealing with the bulk of punters, they got to spend much more time looking at each business.  Large Business was sometimes loathed by the HMRC staff who had to deal with the day-to-day punters. Sometimes with justification. It wasn’t always clear that a subsidiary company was part of a Large Business, and sometimes Local Compliance could be halfway through dealing with a company when they suddenly got ...

  As I've said before - one of the things I liked about working for HM Customs and Excise was that it wasn't like being a boring civil servant. Even after the merger with the Inland Revenue to form HM Revenue and Customs - and despite the "One Civil Service" programme - there was still enough DIVERSITY in the job to make it fun. One example could be found in section 63 (1) of the Customs and Excise Management Act 1979 (and here, I have to admit that I didn't discover it myself, it was pointed out by retired Preventive Officer Ray Gregory in the Customs and Excise History Network newsletter no 31 in Spring 2012). This is the section which tells the ship's master to deliver an outward entry before any export goods are loaded - "other than goods for exportation loaded in accordance with a stiffening order issued by the proper officer.." Isn't that grand? A stiffening order . As far as I can tell that means an order to strengthen the hull of a vess...