HM Revenue & Customs is to close all 170 of its offices across the country in favour of 13 new regional tax centres as part of a major restructuring designed to shave hundreds of millions of pounds from its budget, reports The Telegraph.
The Daily Telegraph understands the radical plan, which will leave towns and cities across the country without a tax office and is likely to lead to thousands of its 56,000 staff being made redundant in the long term, will be announced to staff as early as Thursday.
The cuts are expected to be so severe that there will be no tax office in south-west England west of Bristol, with little or no coverage in East Anglia. The closures risk intensifying concerns about the organisation’s poor customer service record.
HMRC, which has already slashed its staff numbers by almost half to 56,000 in the decade since it replaced the Inland Revenue, is expected to tell its employees that it will “minimise redundancies wherever possible” and expect some workers to travel or change roles, with the closures taking as long as 10 years to happen.
A memo sent to HMRC staff this summer by chief executive Lin Homer warned that the organisation would have to find £80m of savings this year on top of its planned reforms, as the Chancellor George Osborne works through Whitehall to cut as much as 40pc from day-to-day departmental spending.
HMRC cut £210m from its costs in the last financial year, taking its savings to £991m over the past four years.
Currently, the organisation has 170 offices, including 17 call centres. HMRC closed the last of its 281 walk-in help centres last year, removing the option of face-to-face help for 2.5m people a year and placing further pressure on its telephone services. It was recently forced to hire 3,000 more staff to man the phones after it began to fall short on customer service targets.
In March last year, the average wait for a call to be answered was two minutes and 44 seconds. By March 2015, this waiting time had risen to 14 minutes 22 seconds.
The Public Accounts Committee has raised concerns that the overall amount of tax collected in Britain could be hindered by the poor handling of the 60m calls a year to HMRC.
Meg Hillier, the Labour chairman of the committee, said she was concerned by news of the closures, telling The Daily Telegraph: “It is difficult enough getting through on the phones and getting that one-to-one advice. This upheaval, at the very least in the short term, will promise more difficulties.”
Ms Hillier said she was worried that too many experienced tax officers will choose to leave the department rather than move to one of 13 major tax offices. She said her committee would be “watching closely the impact on HMRC’s call response time for customers” during the restructuring.
Ms Homer this week apologised for the recent increase in delays and dropped calls.
