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HMRC (Office Closures)

That is a point, but as I just mentioned the millions of pounds that have been put into my constituency have created further employment opportunities. I find it perverse that, as the hon. Gentleman rightly says, we are supporting regeneration in our communities—mainly seaside ones, by and large—and a huge amount of investment is going in, yet because of the peripherality and transport links the Department seems to say that it is more convenient to move away into city centres, forgetting the difficulties that it will face. I suppose I am thankful that there are no forced redundancies and job losses in this area, although there are thousands of job losses across the civil service. Obviously, there is a degree of concern about that. As I said earlier, the proposal that I am talking about is constructive dismissal in a different format. If I was a trade union official in a factory and was faced with this argument and told, "We are moving, this is fair," I would say, "It is constructive dismissal." We are not making people redundant and I applaud the Government for not enforcing redundancies, but they are forcing people in these circumstances into deciding that they cannot continue in their employment for whatever reason. After my meeting with Paul Grey he gave me the assurances that I mentioned. But recently the new chief executive wrote to PCS on a question about impact assessments, saying,""Impact assessments were carried out on all offices proposed for closure, including Havenbridge House…all impact assessments in the same criteria to assess socio-economic impact."" It is clear that that comment on the socioeconomic impact did not feature at all in the decision-making process, otherwise there would be clear indications of the unemployment levels that we have in Great Yarmouth, which are the highest in the eastern region, albeit much lower than in the past two decades. The tragedy is that answers and solutions that the Department could have used to make significant savings across the board have not been taken into account. The PCS Norwich taxes branch issued a document called "Change we can believe in". What a title! It is a change that I could believe in. It advances clearly and concisely in dozens of pages the argument about how the Department could save millions of pounds in respect of office space, among other things. The PCS was disappointed that it did not even get a response saying, "Sorry, we disagree with your argument, which is wrong because of A, B, C and D." When I challenged the Department, saying that office space in Great Yarmouth is substantially lower in cost than that in Norwich, I was told that such information is commercially confidential. That is a constant argument. We can never get to the bottom of what the difference in cost is. So how can we come to a conclusion about the savings that the Department will make? There is another disturbing point. I have kept details of nearly every single letter and debate and of arguments advanced by many hon. Members in questions. Every time the answer comes back:""HMRC recognises that there will be short-term costs, including staff relocation costs, associated with the closure of Haverfordwest"—" this is in reply to a question asked by the hon. Member for Preseli Pembrokeshire (Mr. Crabb)—""reliable figures will only be established once solutions have been found for all staff and the building has been vacated."—[Official Report, 15 January 2009; Vol. 486, c. 909W.]" So it does not know what the saving will be, and so we go on. How can an alternative be prepared when the savings are not known? It is like saying, "We know that there will be savings, but we don't know how much." Yet there has been a clear indication of where the savings would come from in respect of the three offices at Dereham, Great Yarmouth and Norwich. To my knowledge and from the information that I have received nobody has said, "Those figures are wrong." I can only assume that the savings, which are in excess of a third of a million pounds a year, and running on, must be true or even on the low side, and that is not taking into account the extra costs for travel. I understand that there is no figure in HMRC's budgets for redundancy payments. So where somebody cannot take their job up and we make them redundant how do we pay them? Is there a costing for that? I do not believe that there is any evidence that there has been a true reflection of costs and savings across the range.