1 week ago
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Slap, bang in the centre of Cardiff, between the Principality Stadium and the central train station, is a large, state-of-the-art office building called Ty William Morgan.
Recently built for the UK Government at a reported cost of £100 million, and named after a 16th century bishop who first translated the Bible into Welsh, it boasts 25,000 square metres of desk-space spread across 12 air-conditioned floors.
The whole thing was created to provide a 'home' for 4,500 civil servants, according to a press release circulated at the time of an opening ceremony in December 2022.
It further informed us that the vast majority of them – some 4,000 – would be employed by Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, or HMRC.
These lucky taxmen (and women) were being given a 'modern and inclusive working environment to enable collaborative working and to deliver an effective service for customers', the announcement stated, adding that their swanky new Welsh HQ would help 'create a dynamic and flexible Civil Service which is equipped for the future'.
Recently built for the UK Government at a reported cost of £100 million, and named after a 16th century bishop who first translated the Bible into Welsh, Ty William Morgan boasts 25,000 square metres of desk-space spread across 12 air-conditioned floors
That was the plan, at least. Sixteen months later - last Wednesday morning, to be precise - I visited Ty William Morgan to see how things were working out.
My trip was inspired by a pertinent fact: behind the scenes, HMRC currently finds itself on the front line of a mounting political controversy over the huge number of civil servants who are still choosing to work from home.
Indeed, four years after the Covid pandemic struck, a mere 53 per cent of desks at its prestigious London head office are occupied on any given day, placing it rock bottom of a league table of Whitehall departments published by the government earlier this month. This is despite official guidance mandating a (still-paltry) occupancy rate of at least 60 per cent.
At the same time, the performance of HMRC, which was traditionally one of the most respected government departments, has fallen to some of the worst levels ever recorded.
Taxpayers currently face record average waits of 25 minutes to speak to an adviser on the phone (by contrast, the Universal Credit helpline picks up in 90 seconds), while 840,000 calls to HMRC went unanswered in January alone.
Elsewhere, the department was recently carpeted by the National Audit Office for getting its sums wrong on tax breaks, while last month saw a humiliating U-turn over highly controversial plans to completely shut its telephone line for six months a year, which would have left taxpayers to wrestle with the HMRC website instead.
The latter, hare-brained proposal, which united workers, politicians, tax experts and industry in condemnation, was only junked after Chancellor Jeremy Hunt intervened.
So widespread is the current ill feeling over HMRC's performance that even shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves, whose party wants to make so-called 'flexible working' a universal right, last week pledged to force the department's staff back to the office on the grounds that 'productivity is likely to be higher'.
Some might call that a noble, if shamelessly hypocritical aim. Yet what neither Reeves nor anyone else in front-line politics seems to have fully grasped is just how institutionalised the Inland Revenue's cult of home working has become.
For while the around half of the desks at HMRC's Whitehall HQ are unoccupied on an average day, the proportion is believed to be much, much higher at the provincial offices where the vast majority of its 67,500 staff earn their daily shilling. These locations are, after all, dotted around the UK, in places where it's far easier to hide from the prying eyes of senior politicians and mandarins.
Perhaps suspiciously, the department's press office is refusing to say what proportion of these people – whose salaries are paid by you and me – are currently showing up to the office on any given day.
A spokesperson told me 'we can't share' figures unless the Mail submitted a formal request under the Freedom of Information Act. That process might or might not yield an answer by mid-May.
Permanent Secretary Jim Harra confessed that 'the vast majority' of his organisation's staff 'can, if they wish, choose to work at home for two or three days a week and work in the office for two or three days a week'
In the meantime, the only way to establish what's really going on at the government department which is trying and in many cases failing to competently oversee the tax affairs of 35 million working Britons, is to take a look for oneself.
So the Mail decided to spend 90 minutes on Wednesday, from 8am-9.30am, counting exactly how many of Ty William Morgan's 4,500 supposed occupants actually crossed the building's threshold.
The answer? Just 976, which equates to between a fifth and a quarter of the number of people the expensive building was actually designed for.
To put things another way, it was 3,524 less than the total that would have filled the office to capacity.
While this figure may seem astonishingly low, it's of course important to see it in context. A proportion of workers doubtless turned up at the office before the count started at 8am. And other colleagues certainly arrived after 9.30. Some might have chosen or been required to work night shifts. Others could have been ill, or on holiday (though Welsh schools had returned after the Easter break on Monday).
A few might have been sent away on site visits or training courses. And a proportion will be among the 500 workers employed by different government departments who occupy the premises.
On the other hand, several of the 976 will have been counted twice, since the figure includes the scores of staffers who, having arrived at work, promptly popped outside for a cigarette or vape before going through the entrance doors for a second time.
Yet whichever way one looks at things, it seems highly unlikely that more than half the workers who are supposedly based at Ty William Morgan were actually in the office that day. And a glance through the towering glass windows suggested that significant portions of the building were almost entirely empty.
This seems entirely consistent with what we know about HMRC's official policy, which was revealed to MPs by its Permanent Secretary Jim Harra in October.
He confessed that 'the vast majority' of his organisation's staff 'can, if they wish, choose to work at home for two or three days a week and work in the office for two or three days a week,' which suggests that staff could then choose to work from home on around 60 percent of their days.
And a glance through the towering glass windows of Ty William Morgan suggested that significant portions of the building were almost entirely empty
More recently, the department claims to have introduced a new policy requiring workers to go in three days per week. But, of course, it won't say how many are actually turning up. Grotesquely, attendance seems to have actually declined since lockdown, according to certain measures: figures released last year showed 95 per cent of staff at HMRC staff work remotely at least one day in the working week, up from 92 per cent during the first national pandemic lockdown.
Among those who find this scandalous is Jacob Rees-Mogg, the former Business Secretary. He has long campaigned, with frustratingly mixed results, for the public sector to abandon its pandemic-era employment practices.
'It's really a question of productivity,' he tells me. 'If you have the most efficient government department dealing with calls in a timely manner and doing an excellent job, then OK. But HMRC is failing.'
'It's a department which used to be very good. When I first became an MP, my dealings with HMRC on behalf of constituents tended to be excellent. They were exemplary and efficient. But now you can't get hold of them. There has been a real falling off at HMRC and it coincides directly with working from home.'
The effect on normal taxpayers has been starkly illustrated by a series of MoneyMail investigations into the organisation which revealed, among other things, that some taxpayers are being forced to endure year-long waits for tax refunds and nine-month delays in getting letters responded to.
Many readers complained about the staggering 'unprofessionalism' of the organisation's home workers. One told how a call to HMRC was interrupted by the sound of a baby crying, meaning she was put on hold for ten minutes before the call automatically cut out. Another was told by an employee: 'I'm upstairs but I will pass you down to my wife who is in the dining room and works on tax codes.'
A whistle-blower dubbed the culture of the department a 'shambles' blaming chaotic management, a culture of unprofessionalism, and a wave of unskilled recruits. 'The standard of written English is abysmal in official documents from the department,' he complained. 'In a department like this, clarity and precision are vital - it's shocking.'
One HMRC recruitment advertisement obtained by MoneyMail informed applicants: 'You don't need any existing knowledge or experience of tax to apply.' The sole 'desirable criteria' it listed on the job advert was experience of using Microsoft Outlook, Word and Excel. Several interviewees told how the organisation had made errors with basic tax calculations, or failed to process payments.
A second whistle-blower said it was an 'open secret' that those working from home were taking excessive breaks.
'The training staff were openly saying they were doing the gardening, taking the dog for a walk, playing PlayStation. One used the excuse "I'm taking the cats for a walk". It was astonishing how little work was being done. It's seen as a nice easy number and there was very little accountability.'
HMRC sees things differently. In a statement, the department insisted: 'Hybrid working is part of our approach to being a modern and flexible employer like many other organisations, meaning we can attract and retain the talent we need to deliver for our customers.
'Our colleagues are held to the same standards whether they are working from an HMRC building or from home and our advisers answer the same number of calls on average whether they are in the office or not.'
One set of 'standards' that are certainly not being enforced at Ty William Morgan involve a dress code.
The department's image once revolved around sartorial conservatism. Its advertisements were fronted by Hector the Tax Inspector, a bespectacled, middle-aged man wearing a pinstripe suit and a bowler hat, whose appearance designed to cultivate HMRC's reputation as a paragon of sober professionalism.
In real life, however, the modern taxman prefers to go about his business dressed for a summer music festival, rather than a workplace.
Almost all of the 976 workers who turned up on Wednesday wore casual attire, with a significant proportion turning up in jeans and T-shirts, tracksuit bottoms, hooded tops, white trainers and leggings. Not a single suit or tie was in evidence. And despite the stormy weather conditions several employees seemed happy to shamble on to the premises in denim shorts and, in one case, a Bermuda shirt.
Again this irks Jacob Rees-Mogg, who tells me: 'Many firms in the City have dropped dress-down Fridays because it has come to the conclusion that if people are dressed scruffily they will think scruffily.
'It's about the culture of a place. Your whole mental attitude can be dependent on where you are physically and how you are dressed. It feeds through to how you address work. If you are properly dressed then you are asserting that you have a job which is worth taking seriously.'
Rees-Mogg tried during his ministerial career to clamp down on the excesses of home-working in the Civil Service. He blames the failure of that campaign on 'leadership'.
'You have to say to people who do not come in that when it happens next you will get an official warning, and if you still don't come in you'll be fired,' he says. 'The problem is that HMRC is a non-ministerial department. There is no direct reporting line to ministers, so it's up to officials to make things happen and they have been failing.
'At a middle-management level you have people who quite like working from home and either aren't willing to push to get people back in, or are actively discouraging workers from going into the office because that might make them look bad.'
Yet even if the desire was there, the chances of actually persuading staff at this failing department, or anywhere else in the Civil Service, to make a full-time return to the workplace, seem at best slim.
A few days back, staff at the Office for National Statistics voted for strike action. Not because they were being ordered back to the office every day, but instead because bosses wanted them to henceforth show up on just two days each week.
According to the Public and Commercial Services Union, this prospect 'caused considerable disruption, especially for staff with child-care and other caring arrangements'. The question of whether it might improve the organisation's productivity seemed not to concern them. And on that front many of HMRC's 67,500 casually dressed members of staff, in half empty offices across Britain, will doubtless have been nodding their heads in agreement.
