The
tax-collecting department, which employs 58,000 full-time equivalent workers,
said its current network was an outdated legacy of the 1960s and 1970s and
would be scrapped as part of a ten-year modernisation programme.
It
said it would now bring its workforce together in 13 large, modern regional
centres equipped with digital infrastructure and training facilities. The
announcement confirmed earlier reports. The plan aims to save £100m a year by
2025.
The
centres will be in Newcastle, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, Nottingham,
Birmingham, Cardiff, Belfast, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Bristol, Stratford and
Croydon. The first will open in 2016-17 with the rest following between 2017
and 2021.
HMRC chief
executive Lin Homer said: "HMRC has too many expensive, isolated and
outdated offices.
"This
makes it difficult for us to collaborate, modernise our ways of working, and
make the changes we need to transform our service to customers and clamp down
on the minority who try to cheat the system."
But
the Public and Commercial Services (PCS) union said the cuts would pose a
"significant threat" to the operation of HMRC as well as the working
lives of staff.
HMRC did
not say by how much the size of the workforce would be reduced. But it expects
the majority of staff to be able to move from their current offices to a
regional centre.
It
said it was phasing the move over ten years in order to minimise redundancies,
but added that it did aim to have fewer staff in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment