HM Revenue & Customs

 Message from Bernadette Kenny 

I’m delighted to be joining the Opportunity Now Board and to have the chance to support the work of Business in the Community.  I hope I can both contribute and learn.

April 2005 saw the formation of HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) following the merger of the Inland Revenue and HM Customs & Excise. The new department is now the largest Civil Service department currently employing just under 100,000 staff and our work impacts on every citizen of the UK.

As a new department, HMRC operates in a world in which the expectation of public services is undergoing a dramatic shift, for example:

• customer bases are widening and becoming more diverse
• consumerism, the enterprise culture and fast effective communications mean that customers expect easily accessible services
• public services are expected to fit with changing public values, such as concerns about the environment
• understanding the diversity of employees’ needs is key to retaining and motivating staff and raising awareness of community needs

In addition, over the next few years our department along with all other central Government departments will face many challenges. Those challenges arise out a number of reports commissioned by the government including the Lyons Review and the Gershon Efficiency Programme.

For HMRC, these challenges will impact through the following areas:

• Improved budgetary management – we will operate with a 5% reduction in funding in real terms for each of the three Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) 2007 years (2008-9 to 2010-11)
• Improved customer focus – our aim is to radically improve the customer experience, making it easier for the customer and HMRC to fulfil their obligations
• Deliver efficiency savings – we will reduce running costs by improving the management of processes and assets and by sharing services with other government departments
• Continuing assimilation of practices and policies from both former departments and development of new strategies and procedures

 We are committed to managing our business to maximise our positive impact on all our stakeholders (including our customers and suppliers), the community and the environment and to minimise and manage any potential negative impact. Corporate responsibility is a vital element of HMRC because it helps us achieve our objectives and because the way we do business impacts on millions of people (both at home and abroad) as customers and our own employees.

In order to achieve required efficiency savings, we will see a reduction in our staff resource levels over the next few years. However, there is no indication that our workloads will mirror that reduction. We already deal with in excess of 270 million customer contacts each year including answering around 15 million telephone calls within less than 20 seconds. In order to continue to meet our obligations we will need to:

• Ensure managers have the skills and tools required to be effective in their roles
• Do more to encourage innovative thinking within our own people and better harness existing skills and talents within the workforce
• Motivate our staff to give of their best, recognising and addressing development needs and encouraging the maintenance of a healthy work-life balance
• Maintain a workforce that reflects the society it serves
• Gain a better understanding of the different needs of our customers whilst continuing to maintain our obligations to Ministers and other external stakeholders

We rightly recognise the important role that diversity plays in our business whether it be in terms of our customers or our staff. We recognise that the society that we serve is changing and we need to do more to ensure that our services continue to be fit for purpose. The introduction of the Gender Equality Duty is viewed very much as a positive driver in our business. Our Gender Equality Scheme will set out our goals in this respect including:

• Continuing to monitor the Gender Pay Gap - because of the recent merger of the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise, we have already undertaken a major pay assimilation exercise which along with our policies on flexible working and training has effectively closed the gap for HMRC in most cases.
• Ensuring the privacy and dignity of transsexual men and women is maintained whether as employees or customers/service users
• Maintaining a robust Procurement policy and strategy to ensure the diversity aims, objectives and practices of service providers are ethically acceptable to us
• Undertaking a project to examine how we deal with adult women who are accused or convicted of offences
• Examining our recruitment/advancement policies to ensure fairness and equality of opportunity
• Continue to develop the use of Equality Impact Assessments throughout the department where appropriate

We have already made changes in the way we manage our workload; to be able to provide a telephone service to customers outside of normal office hours, we have introduced “twilight” shifts in our Contact Centres. This is beneficial to our customers as they have a greater choice of when to contact us and the revised working arrangements also benefit our people, particularly those with home-caring commitments, providing them with the opportunity of a career that many had not thought possible. In addition, HMRC has a number of “family-friendly” policies governing time-off. These policies cover parental leave, adoption, pregnancy and work and paternity. We have also recently introduced a Childcare Voucher scheme which offers support to all those with childcare responsibilities across the department, no matter which type of registered or approved childcare they use. We have launched this scheme as we recognise that many of our staff need flexible pre-school and out-of-school childcare of a type and in a location most convenient to them.  

With the anticipated reduction in our workforce over the coming years, the principles of diversity are set to play an ever more important role in our business. The Civil Service equal opportunities policy provides that all eligible people must have equality of opportunity for employment and advancement based on their suitability for the work and we intend to continue working hard to achieve this. We want to build on the vision of Waqar Azmi, Chief Diversity Advisor to the Civil Service as set out in his published document to be found on the Civil Service website and make HMRC a beacon for change and leading-edge for best practice – a truly 21^st century organisation representative of the society we serve.