Article for Outlook Magazine - Southend Customs & Excise Branch

I would like to thank Out Look, for this opportunity to express my thoughts and those of my colleagues from the “former Inland Revenue” regarding the formation of the new Department.

I am sure that many colleagues in the “former Customs & Excise” view the merger as a takeover by the Revenue. As we were previously the larger Department, this is a perfectly natural point of view. When the Revenue took in the Contributions Agency in 1999, it was clearly a takeover and that merger followed in that fashion.

On 19 April 2005, the new Department came into being with a whimper rather than a bang. I am sure that if the former IR Chairman, Sir Nicholas Montagu, had been permitted to carry on, there would have been a series of big announcements and a lot of grandstanding by senior management.

The new Chairman, David Varney, seems to have abandoned the style and vanity projects of his predecessor and purportedly wishes to concentrate on “delivering the business” of HMRC. On one level, I am sure many colleagues welcome this more down to earth approach. However, as we are now seeing, Ex-Com’s priorities are very different to ours as members of PCS. Ex-Com have acted quickly to establish new structures but seem indifferent to the issues of terms & conditions and, especially, pay. This is an untenable situation which the PCS cannot allow the Department to leave unresolved any further.

Like many colleagues, I consider that the new Department is very different animal to the one we knew previously. Our concern is, rather than taking over C&E, we will move towards their highly centralised structure, and away from the network of local Revenue offices. At the forefront of the move to centralisation are such functions as Human Resources and banking services. Of course, centralisation is one way in which job losses will be generated.

We have now had the announcement that HMRC will be comprised of 36 business units. It is claimed by Ex-Com that these units will be inter-dependant, but I suspect that as with the earlier Revenue “business streams” there will be an amount of fragmentation between the different work areas. Already the Revenue’s Regional Offices have been “abolished” and the new streams brought into being. There is great uncertainty as to how the management structures will work and what will be the effect on staff. We are also seeing management attempt to retreat away from the Whitley system, which is causing great concern to PCS and other Trade Unions within HMRC.

The fragmentation of work areas causes great problems for PCS in organising and how we represent members. Within the “former Revenue”, the PCS has not come to terms with, and reorganise Branches to adapt to the Area Management system introduced 5 years ago. Now that the idea of Area Management itself is about to be swept away, the organisation of PCS at local and Branch level will be even further behind management.

The key task for PCS is to prevent the fragmentation of the Department from letting us pursue our goals and priorities in representing members. We should not accept that any representative cannot represent any PCS member. Just because the employer is promoting separation between groups of workers in different areas, PCS members as Trade Unionists should look to our traditional maxim that unity is strength. We should not allow HMRC to divide and conquer us, as their action to date clearly show that this is their intention.

Ian Pope - Chair,South Essex Revenue Branch

July 2005