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Welsh Affairs

I am sorry but I shall not give way, because if I take less than the allotted time, everybody else will be able to speak. Central to the concerns of my constituents is the provision of public services, with particular concern about the UK Government’s apparent attitude towards the future delivery of the services for which they are still responsible in Wales. People in Wales are surprised and alarmed that a Labour Government, again and again, look to the use of the private sector and free market competition to provide what have always been regarded as core public sector service responsibilities. People are conscious, and grateful, that Wales has not experienced the worst of that approach in the health and education sectors, because responsibility for them is devolved and the Welsh Assembly Government are not following the English lead, with trust hospitals and schools and the establishment of winner and loser competitions where patients and children are the potential losers. The National Assembly is to be congratulated on taking quite a different approach, which is based on honouring the public service ethos, building on it and developing services around the strong sense of community, mutuality and local ownership that still exists in Wales. That is the right way forward and I hope the Assembly sticks to it. I am sure it will. Vital public service functions delivered in Wales are still the responsibility of UK Departments, however, where enthusiasm for moving to a commissioner and contractor structure appears to be strong, even though it is justified by precious little evidence. Like many colleagues, I was contacted by a considerable number of probation workers living in my constituency who cannot understand the rationale for abolishing the national probation service, only to replace it with a competitive market that will take away local accountability in the process. After yesterday’s vote on the Offender Management Bill, I fear that there will be a marked reduction in the quality of service, with the real danger of an increase in reoffending. Similarly, I have been lobbied by employees at the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency in Swansea who believe that preparations are under way to throw them to the market to reduce costs. Their fear and their belief is that that will be achieved by a diminution in standards if the consultants’ investigations recommend wholesale outsourcing, as they suspect. We have already seen what has happened to the Ministry of Defence in Llangennech, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Llanelli (Nia Griffith), where some of my constituents work. Jobs are being rationalised away on the most dubious grounds. I shall concentrate my brief remarks on what is happening to Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs in Wales, to which the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb) and my hon. Friend the Member for Newport, West (Paul Flynn) have already referred. The staff of HMRC are disillusioned and angry about what is being done to their service and are trying to secure change before it is too late. The HMRC is of course a fairly new creation, combining the responsibilities of the Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise. Even before the merger, both the old departments had undergone considerable reorganisation, but nothing had prepared the civil servants for the announcement on 16 November last year of the department’s intention to shed 25,000 jobs across the UK by 2011, closing hundreds of local offices in the process. If that goes ahead, the impact in Wales will be particularly acute, with something like 1,000 jobs at risk. Threatened with closure are the Aberystwyth office, the Haverfordwest office, the Holyhead office, the Llanelli office, the Bridgend office, the Pontypridd office, the Porthmadog office and others. Yet more are proposed for downgrading. Understandably, the Public and Commercial Services union, which represents the employees affected, is focusing on the impact that that will have on the lives of their members and their families, and the economic consequences for the communities where offices are planned for closure and where jobs will be removed. However, it also makes a powerful case about the likely impact on the work of Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs and draws attention to how extremely centralising the proposed new structures would be, if and when introduced. One of the specific functions of HMRC is called debt management and banking—the old collector of taxes role—which involves collecting duties from customers who have not paid their taxes on time and which is now going to be centralised in Cardiff. That is an alarming prospect when one learns that there is already a backlog of 1 million unworked and unanswered pieces of correspondence in large processing offices, such as Cardiff, around the country. In fact, processing—things such as the capture of self-assessment tax returns and ensuring that pay-as-you-earn customers have the correct amount of tax deducted from pay—will be centralised in Cardiff and Wrexham by 2010. The fear is that that is bound to be bad news for customers throughout Wales. At least Cardiff and Wrexham are in Wales, however. VAT registration jobs that are now based in west Wales are going to Grimsby and Wolverhampton. Capital gains tax inquiries, which were once dealt with by teams across Wales, are also now to be dealt with by one team in Cardiff. That approach is reflected in plans for many of the HMRC’s functions in Wales. We face the loss of operational intelligence, detection and business services under the departmental plans. The shift is away from the local, towards the centre, and it seems to go against much of recent Government rhetoric. The union tells me that there is no senior civil servant with direct managerial control in HMRC in Wales. There is no regional or national forum in HMRC in Wales in which management and trade unions can meet to negotiate and find solutions to problems specific to Wales. There is to be new investment in something called local compliance, where staff will have the job of detecting customers who have not paid the correct tax or have not declared themselves to the authorities, but those jobs are going outside Wales. Indeed, in HMRC, ““local”” compliance is a misleading description. The local compliance zone for Wales is Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, with the top civil servants based in Scotland. The PCS union estimates that the distances involved in covering this structure result in some 100 plane journeys a month by senior civil servants in local compliance alone. The negative environmental impact and the colossal carbon footprint do not just result from air travel. With the new structures, many middle managers now have staff under them from all over Wales and beyond. They are clocking up tens of thousands of road miles trying to keep in regular touch with their juniors. It is right, however, to say that Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs does not exist just to provide jobs for civil servants. Its function is to provide a high-quality service to its customers. Is it fulfilling that function with its new approach and structure? Apparently it is not, if a million pieces of correspondence lying unanswered, and the constituents who contact me to complain about the weeks that they have to wait for responses to important queries, are anything go by. Problem solving will certainly not be helped by removing the link between the customer and her or his local office. Looking at the proposals, I have a sense of déjà vu. A few years back, before the merger, Customs and Excise decided to remove customs officers from the Welsh ports and to work in future on a basis of risk assessment from centralised England locations. That was a mistake then, and this is a mistake now. Surely it would be far better to think again and set the objective of improving the working of the department on the basis of local services and local management, delivering for local people. That is the direction that we should be heading in and that is the direction that I keep hearing Ministers say they want to head in. Let us make a start with Revenue and Customs and let us get back to properly respecting and valuing our public servants, whether at local, Welsh Assembly or UK Government level.