Lin Homer
Chief Executive of HM Revenue and Customs
What were your biggest policy and delivery challenges in 2013, and how did you handle them?
Our biggest policy and delivery challenge has been around tax avoidance, where we’ve made great strides but where policy is made against a backdrop where most people have a one-sided view of tax. They’d prefer personally to pay less, but they think many others (including coffee shops etc) should pay more.
We continue to apply the law as it is, and to try to ensure cheating doesn’t work whilst we collaborate with Treasury colleagues to improve the policy base. It doesn’t always make us popular, but we are the bedrock of public services, bringing in a massive £475.6bn per year… which our colleagues happily spend on all those vital public services!
Where have you made the most progress in implementing the Civil Service Reform Plan, and what are your reform priorities for 2014?
We have made some significant progress in moving our digital and data agenda on, though there is still lots to do. We have plans for four significant exemplars in 2014, which will give individual and business taxpayers a great opportunity for improved service.
My passion – where we haven’t done enough but we are gearing up fast – is to be one of the best places in the public sector to train, develop and learn. We have around 17,000 tax professionals and thousands of other experts in PPM, operational delivery, law, finance, policy and HR. In the last three and a half years, we’ve promoted 7,500 people. So although the HMRC of the future will be smaller, we hope opportunities and job enjoyment will be better.
What are your key challenges in the last year of the Parliament? How will you tackle them?
Like everyone we’ve got to do more with less, bring in more yield with less people, and yet still deliver good service. It’s hard when you’ve got 49m customers and yield targets that are counted in billions. We have some sound and tested ideas on how we achieve this, but we’ve not yet persuaded all our folk that the plan is exciting and that it can work. So as well as delivering we’ve still got a really big engagement task.
What would you most like Santa to bring you this year? And what should he take away?
Can he take away the Daily Mail wooden spoon for poor customer service please? We’ve been awarded it before, and we don’t like getting it! We know what we’ve got to do, and telephone, post and general service is improving, but for customers failure stays in the memory and you really have to earn the improvement.
And he can bring me snow for Christmas, please. We’re in Suffolk this year, and – whilst all the kids may be in their 20s, and I’m nearer 60 than 50 – we still expect snowballs on Christmas day!