More HMRC workers at home than during Covid.
” It is not possible for employees to work as satisfactorily from home compared to the way they do in a regular office. There can not be the same level of supervision from line managers when work takes place at home. This news is further evidence of the failings of a department which is not achieving the standards expected of it by the public. Furthermore, there are limited ways of developing team spirit if the office is empty.”
Nigel Holland
- More HMRC workers at home than during Covid.
- FEWER tax office staff are working in the office now than there were during lockdown, even as customer service plummets to “unacceptable” levels.
- Official data found that more than a third of Government departments were emptier in July compared to the same month the previous year.
- Around 95 per cent of staff at HM Revenue and Customs now work remotely for at least one day in the working week.
- That is higher than in the first national pandemic lockdown, when the proportion of HMRC staff working away from the office rose to 92 per cent, up from around a third in 2019
- Only around 3,000 of the 64,000 HMRC staff work full-time in an office over a conventional five-day week.
- Despite being a year further on from the pandemic, seven out of 19 departments saw their average occupancy rates in their headquarters fall.
- The tax office also failed to hit any of its own performance targets last year, accounts in July showed, and came under fire in June after announcing it was closing one of its key customer phone lines over the summer.
- It was forced to create a special taskforce to deal with the backlog, consisting of more than 37,000 pieces of correspondence which are at least 10 months old.