arcnews 72

arc-forum.org

ISSUE 72 | JULY/AUGUST 2014

The importance of campaigningp4

“Last year HMRC brought in an additional £24bn from our effort to tackle tax avoidance—£24bn which would not otherwise have been made available.”

“What set us on this path was the decision to shift the public focus from a banking crisis to a public expenditure crisis.” Tony Wallace—6

“I do have a problem with rewriting objectives to set up people to fail.” lucy Bradley, aGM—17

“I’ve a confession to make: I’m leaving to join the dark side.” Ben ProcTor, aGM—21

arc-forum.org

2 arcnews JULY/AUGUST 2014: ISSUE 72

Y ou don’t have to be Eddie Cochrane to feel the summertime blues.

Bored kids, half empty offices, English batsmen chucking their wickets away like brides launching their bouquet to the hopefuls in some fifties American Rom-Com (to be swiftly followed by the ultimate tribute band of India’s batsmen doing precisely the same thing). I live and work in London, where we have the added pleasure of the tube turning into a bad-tempered sauna for three months. Then, just when you get used to travelling to work in shirt-sleeves, it rains.

And yet, and yet… This is only a prelude to the new-term feeling that starts in September. This year that new term starts with a re-engagement between ARC and HMRC management, endorsed by members in the ballot that ended on 5 August. Because our ballot necessarily occurred during the holiday period I ended up addressing three Centre meetings, in addition to attending my own Centre where Jim Mullen put the case for re-engagement. At every meeting there was resigned acceptance of re-engagement, in one or two cases bordering on mild enthusiasm. And at each meeting there was one member who put the case for voting no. All four of these advocates put their case well and in a comradely manner; and at every meeting I gained the impression that other members present, while in favour of re-engagement, agreed with and respected much of the minority case, and certainly heard him or her out with courtesy.

I think this just underlines the fact that this was something of a judgement call (for the department too, but their debating and decision-making doesn’t have to be played out in public as ours does). Many will have voted yes with private reservations (personally, I think that will also be the case for some who voted no). As a union we have now taken a decision, and we need to ensure that those reservations, and the views of those who voted no, are addressed. I think this is even more important, however, for HMRC. It would be a disaster for the department if their actions following the vote merely serve to confirm the doubts of those who were in the minority in the ballot. That doesn’t mean I expect them to make concessions on the principles that divide us, any more than it means ARC has accepted PMR. I would expect them to make every effort to engage constructively, as we will, over the real concerns members have about the way PMR has played out.

Welcome to the slightly delayed summer issue. We bring you the keynote AGM speeches from Gareth Hills and Dave Penman as well as edited versions of addresses from some important external speakers. You also get Gareth’s dinner speech and full reports of the debates at the AGM, including the traditional first-timer’s impressions from Ros Shaw.

Next month we will carry a report of the FDA ADC, primarily from the ARC perspective (although the full transcript is on the FDA website).

Will Richardson

Editor

EDITORIAL

WILL RICHARDSON

FIRST

arcnews JULY/AUGUST 2014: ISSUE 72 3

is published by the Association of Revenue and Customs (ARC) 8 Leake Street, London SE1 7NN

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FIRST

ARCNEWS 70 COMPETITIONWinner of competition number 70. Congratulations to Miles Nelson, who increased his chances with three entries but only wins once.

CAPTION COMPETITION

THIS MONTH’S COMPETITIONThe picture, taken at lunch during the 2014 AGM, shows Allan Lyons (left) with Mark Johnson. But what might either of them be saying or thinking? Entries by 1 October to [email protected]

“What did the Queen say when

she gave you yours, Terry?”

“Are you that chappy from Last

of the Summer Wine?”

THIS MONTH’S COMPETITION

ARCNEWS 70

mailto:[email protected]





FIRST

why campaigning is importantEarlier last month I had the great pleasure of joining Manchester ARC members in presenting to the city’s People’s History Museum some of the materials that we used on our Valentine’s Day of Action. The museum is an excellent place to visit and has a great wealth of interesting material on the history of the Labour movement, including some stuff very close to my heart. I would recommend it to anyone who is visiting Manchester and, as it is only just across the road from Albert Bridge House, you could easily squeeze in a quick visit on a lunch break.

I delivered a short speech to mark the event and thought that it might be appropriate to re-publish it here (with some editorial tidying up on my part!).

Tony Wallace


FIRST

>>

Thank you first to the People’s History Museum. This is a great place to visit

and is clearly dedicated to keeping the social history of our country alive, a history which is not being formally kept alive elsewhere. Without you, much of the social history

important to ordinary people would be forgotten.

Thank you secondly to our mem-bers and to Manchester Centre for the support that you have given to us throughout this and earlier cam-paigns. Manchester had a great pres-ence on Valentine’s Day; as great as any Centre in the country.

Trade Unions have a long and

proud history of campaigning. My father was the President of the now long-defunct Scottish Carpet work-ers Union in the 1970s and, despite what the world would have you believe, the trade union movement did some great things then. Although I was only a boy, I was lucky enough to see some of the great campaigning work they did first-hand, including:


the Sex Discrimination Act 1975, The Health and Safety at Work Act 1974 and the fight to keep men at work on the Clyde in the face of Government closure plans and oppo-sition. For the record, they didn’t strike, just the opposite – they took control of their yard, carried on working and kept the ships sailing out! But the union role in campaign-ing goes back long before that; back through the reforms of the Labour Government of 1947, through the General Strike of 1926, the Chartist movement and the “Labour” Government of 1845, and all the way to Peterloo in 1819. Now I am in no way suggesting that our campaigns are in any way a corollary of those historic events, but there is a golden thread of campaigning that runs right through the history of the trade union movement and, small though it may be, we are playing our part in that.

ARC came to the world of cam-paigning only very recently and, I must say, with some trepidation. We are a union of senior professionals, managers and leaders in HMRC. We

are pretty niche by anyone’s stand-ards. We are a senior part of the Civil Service and we are all in politically restricted grades; which is as it should be. No one would want Government to return to the truly bad old days that existed before the Northcote-Trevelyan review of 1853. Our mem-bers are, by definition, a pretty con-servative bunch but remaining politi-cally neutral does not always mean remaining silent.

What set us on this path was the decision to shift the public focus from a banking crisis to a public expendi-ture crisis. That happened in the time of my predecessor’s predecessor, Graham Black. Presidents of ARC come and go with monotonous regu-larity! We could see the way that the wind was blowing and the effect that austerity would have on our jobs, our organisation and on the civil society we serve. It led us to our first cam-paign – Defeat the Deficit.

We knew that we would never be at the top of people’s Christmas card list and that tax people will not get the sympathy that the public rightly give to teachers, nurses and firefighters. It

was also important to stay politically neutral, so our campaign was built on two legs.

Firstly, we focused on what we deliver for the country we serve and that became Gareth Hills’s now widely recognised “builders” piece: we build schools and hospitals, and pro-vide the stitching which holds the fabric of society together. Gareth gave our purpose a “nobility” which, I notice, has not quite gone away although it is now described as “vital”.

The second route was to make it clear to politicians that we were not interested in influencing their politi-cal planning. The decision to budget for their policy aspirations absolutely remained with them, as it should. But without funds, no political aspiration will get anywhere. We met MPs, lob-bied in Parliament and visited the Lords. I myself met the Liberal peers Lords Newby and Oakshott; Lord Oakshott is now famous for rather different political reasons.

Both messages were simple but very effective and they worked. In the 2010 spending round, £917m was re-allocated to HMRC to reinvest in

<<

FIRST


compliance activity with a view to generat-ing additional compli-ance yield of £7bn per year by 2015. There is plenty of evidence to dem-onstrate that we are on track to achieve that and much of that is down to the hard work of you, our members. We were ahead of the game, trading on the “all in it together theme” long before it gained political currency. And now the focus on avoidance is everywhere you look. We didn’t do it all ourselves but we certainly played a part.

And we have gone on; we now contribute strongly to the wider FDA Delivering for the Nation Campaign and its themes of Recognition, Resource and Reward. We and FDA colleagues focus on the good that Civil Servants do for society. We hosted our event in Parliament: Closing the Tax Gap – Delivering for the Nation, which was addressed by David Gauke MP, [then] Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury; Catherine McKinnell, his Labour Shadow and Steven Williams Lib Dem Treasury spokes-man. On 8 July this year we will follow that up with a further Parliamentary event to be chaired by Margaret Hodge MP. We will once again ensure that you, our members, get the recognition that you deserve for the great work that you do.

Our latest campaign, Careers not Quotas, has developed out of the industrial action campaign we embarked upon earlier this year and the materials we developed were once again created with a view to taking the focus away from our members as indi-viduals and moving it to the good we do for the country. That is why we

used the image of the Broken Heart, the theme of falling out of

love with our employer and our hatred of

bureaucracy. The focus was on the organisational

damage that is being done and was chosen to make sure that we

would not give anyone an opportunity to use the tired old lines about the efficacy of Civil Servants; a caricature which we know is without foundation. The dispute continues but it will at some point end; all disputes do. But our campaign will carry on into a new phase.

We will continue to highlight the inadequacies of the current PMR system, the damage that it is doing to our members as individuals and the wider damage it is doing to our employer as an organisation. But our campaign will do more than that. It will allow us to re-focus on what we want as a member-led organisation.

Last year HMRC brought in an additional £24bn from our effort to tackle tax avoidance. That was an effort led by our members and it means that £24bn which would not otherwise have been made available to our country can now be used to support the infrastructure upon which we all depend. We have much to be proud of in delivering that result, and that delivery it gives us the right to an opinion as to what the future of our careers and our organi-sation should look like. We will use our campaigning activity to ensure that we make the case for Careers not Quotas; to work for the good of our members, our organisation and the civil society we serve.

We started off nervously but we have a taste for this now.

“There is a golden thread of campaigning that runs right through the history of the trade union movement and, small though it may be, we are playing our part in that.”

8 arcnews JULY/AUGUST 2014

’14AnnualGeneralMeeting

Will Richardson gives the low-down on all the motions, comotions, speeches and revelries.Photos by Jonathan Gardiner.

arcnews JULY/AUGUST 2014 9

KEYNOTE: Dave Penman ......................................10

KEYNOTE: Gareth Hills ..........................................14

CONFERENCE VIRGIN: Ros Shaw .......................18

KEYNOTE: Chris Johnes, OXFAM, ........................22

DINNER: Photos and Gareth Hills’ speech .......28

KEYNOTE: Nicola Smith, TUC ..............................32

KEYNOTE: Guy Hooper .........................................40

KEYNOTE EQUAL PAY: Helen Baird-Parker and Terry Cook................................46

CLOSING REMARKS: ..............................................50

MOTIONS: ............................................................11-51



Introduction by Gareth HillsI’m delighted to welcome along Dave Penman our general secretary, for those who don’t know him Dave was elected as FDA General Secretary in May 2012 and actually took up office in July that year. Dave joined FDA as a national officer in 2000 before being promoted to the senior management team as head of operations and then Deputy General Secretary. Since becoming General Secretary Dave has been elected onto the TUC General Council in September 2012 and re-elected in 2013. Dave enjoys theatre, crime fiction novels and following Scottish premier league football club Partick Thistle. It was Dave’s birthday yesterday. Now Dave was born on the same day and the same year as John Parkhouse. I leave it to you which one looks the younger, all I will say is that the General Secretary’s birthday was actu-ally listed yesterday in the Guardian’s birthday listing and I can’t tell you how delighted he was, so delighted he sent me a text at some ridiculous o’clock yesterday morning.

Thank you very much. President, Conference, that’s most of my first couple of pages of speech gone because I was going to share that personal milestone with you, and to say that, along

with Stevie Wonder, Richard Madeley, Selina Scott and Zoe Wanamaker, and of course your very own John Parkhouse, we celebrated our birthday and bizarrely we are actually born on the same day; we’ve never compared times though clearly John had a tougher paper round than I had as a child. But at the point I appeared on the Guardian birthday list, I was ridiculously chuffed about that and I was thinking, for a wee boy from Cumbernauld you know it’s quite something. And then I thought, in terms of today’s speech, if only there’d been a member of Take That on that list sharing a birthday this speech would have written itself to be honest

Now you may ask what’s that got to do with anything? So, before I turn 48, we face a couple of other significant milestones. Scotland has its ref-erendum on independence in September and we’ll have a general election next May and I’ll talk more

KEYNOTE ADDRESS:

Dave Penman FDA General Secretary


at FDA’s annual conference tomorrow on what that might mean for us as a union. But for a UK civil service department like HMRC the referendum, which many now believe could result in a yes vote, could have more significant consequences for ARC than the outcome of the general election. But the civil service has witnessed an unprecedented four years since the last election. Many departments have seen cuts of almost 30 percent of resources and posts. ARC’s Defeat the Deficit campaign and the continued work to highlight the value to the taxpayer of investment in skilled tax professionals has helped create an argument for reinvestment of some resources in HMRC. But the overall picture for the civil service, currently at its smallest since the Second World War and due to shrink further, is quite bleak.

Now the general election I mentioned as that neat segue from my birthday – did I mention that I was in the Guardian yesterday? – is unlikely to result in any meaningful change on resources, regardless of the outcome. The Chancellor has already said that if he gets re-elected it’ll be more of the same: cuts at the same rate – around five percent a year. Added to that, departments are facing a two percent increase in pension contribu-tions from 2015, and a three percent increase in National Insurance contributions from 2016, both of which are unfunded. So the first few years of the next parliament could actually make this one look positively generous. Labour is desperate to prove their fiscal miserliness and they’re unlikely to be any more generous to a civil service that, for most cost-cutting Chancellors, is simply the gift that keeps on giving. Remember colleagues, it was a Labour government that started the work on cutting the civil service and your terms and conditions with their plans for changes to the compensation scheme.

But we have also faced ideological attacks.

MOTIONS 1-10:

Domestics & traineesWill Richardson reports on the opening routines of conference and the debates on trainees.

The beginning of the AGM is usually a familiar matter to old hands, the same half-dozen routine domestic mo-tions are nodded through in a few minutes, dealing with the minutes of last year’s AGM, the Annual Report, the Finan-cial Report and Accounts and three other Treasurer’s mo-tions on the Benevolent Fund, the political fund (known to us as ‘the provisional section-al subscriptions’) and the be-loved peppercorn. We’ve been threatening to abolish the peppercorn for years, but like the horse in the old Schedule E legislation it has hung on for longer than people expected.

This year the opening rou-tine was varied slightly. Ga-reth Hills, doubtless demob-happy, rushing to propose the first motion before Graham Flew, Convenor of the Pro-cedure Sub-Committee, had been given a chance to pro-pose acceptance of their re-ports. This falls into the ‘bor-ing but important’ category – without confirming the re-ports, AGM has no timetable, agreed restrictions on speak-ing time, standing orders or notice of precedence (when the passing of one motion means the automatic failure – without debate – of another.) Having done Graham’s job myself for years I felt sympa-thy for him as he politely but firmly insisted on presenting the reports, which were then nodded through. Gareth was then allowed to start the day’s business.

The other big change was that the financial motions were formally proposed by Eugene Mitchell, who had just taken over as Treasurer from Martin Fletcher. Martin had been Treasurer for nearly three decades, so his absence from the podium almost felt like a breach of procedure.

Eugene sailed through this first big test with flying col-ours and the AGM turned to the substantive policy mo-tions that form the meat of the agenda.

The first batch of motions dealt with trainee matters. Peter Horne (pictured below))

Centre Secretary of the newly formed London BCD Centre1 moved MOTION 8 calling for better consultation and com-munications. Explaining that the motion was about last-minute changes to trainee arrangements he added that he was proposing the motion “because there’s been a last minute change to trainee organisation and the trainee who was going to propose the motion is not here.” Trainees and their BLMs felt there was a lack of communication, and especially objected to having specific problems excluded from discussion.

He was followed by Vicky Johnson of West Midlands Centre proposing MOTION 9, in common debate with MO-TION 8 Vicky’s motion concen-trated on the interaction be-tween departmental changes such as the split of Large and Complex with changes to the training courses themselves, and pleaded for trainees to be kept informed and protected from adverse effects arising from departmental change

“If you take the ten fastest men in history, get them to race over 100 metres, and tell them you’ll shoot whoever comes last...actually it would be Carl Lewis. Won gold medals, ran 100 metres in 9.86 seconds, but if he worked in HMRC he would be a “must improve”.

1 Bush House, Customs House and Annexe, and Dorset House. This is one of the four new Centres formed from the previous London Centre. The oth-ers are 100 PS, London Euston and South Lon-don Centres.

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“If we are to remain a strong pragmatic and vibrant union, the voice of senior managers and professionals, then we urgently need to address the level of membership. Fifty percent membership should never be good enough.”

This government arrived determined to prove that the civil service was over resourced and overpaid. We faced a tax on living standards, a pensions levy, and cuts to pensions. And whilst I will argue that our approach delivered the best possible out-come, it was still part of an ideological obsession with the pay and conditions of public servants. And, like most obsessions, it ignores the evidence and drives on regardless.

A year into power the Chancellor announced a review into regional pay in the civil service, convinced they were overpaying in most of the country. Does anyone remember the publication of that report? If only they’d asked us, we could have saved them the embarrassment of sneaking it out, late in the week after the autumn statement in 2012. It showed of course that above Executive Officer level in the civil service we were behind the market in almost every region. The higher up the grading structure you go, and the closer you get to London, the further it falls behind the market. And for the most senior and specialist roles, like most of you in this room, the numbers are incomparable. And you’ve just been discussing that very issue.

But regardless they plough on ahead with their obsessions. So we see cuts to terms and condi-tions, again without any credible evidence to support it, and their supposedly market-facing comparisons. And then of course there are the obsessions that are about more than false market comparisons. I speak about the ideological obses-sion with relative assessment. It’s the only way I can rationalise the unfaltering commitment in the civil service, convinced by a premise that there will always be a proportion of any group that are failing, and an evidence-bereft belief that it drives continual improvement. It’s been around in the civil service for over a decade; it’s a constant source of discontent in the Senior Civil Service and in every survey we conduct. Unappealable questionable outcomes for the most disadvan-taged groups and more likely to demotivate than motivate. The best analogy for the scheme I heard actually came from my dear old Dad. He said if you take the ten fastest men in history, get them to race over 100 metres, and tell them you’ll shoot whoever comes last, you’re always going to have to shoot someone however fast they run. And actu-ally it would be Carl Lewis. Won gold medals, ran 100 metres in 9.86 seconds, but if he worked in HMRC he would be a “must improve”.

I was talking to an ARC rep on the picket line at

Custom House in February about the bureaucracy of the scheme. And by the way, why is it the trade union movement seems incapable of organising a strike in the summer? But anyway, he told me that he stopped counting the number of hours he spent managing the performance management scheme when it got to over a hundred. Ideological obses-sion gets in the way of doing your day job, just to prove some management consultancy’s self-fulfill-ing prophecy that it will identify poor performers. Now I was proud to stand on a picket line with ARC members on Valentine ’s Day and you’ll have seen from the messages of support from across the union, that many fellow FDA members face the same issues in their departments.

But industrial action is never an end in itself. It is, and always should be, about delivering a better outcome for members. And I’ve seen at first hand the tireless work of the negotiating team and ARC Committee as it tries to find a settlement. I have and will continue to support those efforts because in the end a settlement needs to be found for the benefit of members and for HMRC as an organ-isation.

Now I’d also want to add my personal gratitude to Gareth for all his work on behalf of members over the last couple of years, both as President of ARC and as Vice President of the FDA. He’s not only been an able and articulate advocate for FDA members in HMRC, but as Vice President he’s been out and about proselytising across the country to sections and branches, to embrace the Delivering for the Nation campaign, urging them to find their own unique noble purpose. I hope you continue in that work Gareth, because FDA is all the stronger for your efforts.

And, of course, your incoming president, Tony. I first met Tony 29 years ago. My first gainful employment was in the Inland Revenue Accounts Office in Cumbernauld. We share a bit of his-tory, Tony and I, but that’s a story for another day. But who would have thought two wee boys from


Cumbernauld would be leading the union for senior managers and professionals. Our difficulty of course is not in our education or ability or our background, it’s just that most people only under-stand about 25 percent of what we say when we talk to each other. Tony, I look forward to working with you as President over the next couple of years.

My final thought, conference, is that if we are to remain a strong pragmatic and vibrant union, the voice of senior managers and professionals, then we urgently need to address the level of mem-bership. Fifty percent membership should never be good enough. This is not just a message for ARC and will be a key feature of conference tomorrow. It is about both finance and legitimacy. As the civil service shrinks so our membership shrinks. As I said earlier, this will be the picture for nearly a decade by the end of this parliament. It is about our ability to remain an independent union: it is that serious. Building high levels of membership is also being able to speak up for the vast majority of staff when we engage with employers. We cannot give them easy wins and allow them to question our legitimacy. We need to recruit the non mem-bers in our current areas of recognition, and we also need to look beyond those boundaries. This issue in particular will be debated tomorrow. And finally on membership recruitment, I’d urge you to look at our new membership benefit scheme which we are launching next month and those of you attending the conference tomorrow will get the opportunity to preview it.

ARC has an important part to play in helping to shape the future of our union. FDA is stronger with a strong ARC in its core. And ARC is stronger with a strong FDA supporting it. The Valentine’s Day strike and the role the wider FDA played in supporting it, I hope, demonstrated that

over which they have no con-trol. She closed with a call for Committee to “work with the Tax Academy to make sure that the training programme’s structure works for all of the trainees now within each directorate.”

Gareth then opened com-mon debate on the two mo-

tions and Kerry Singleton came to the podium to speak partly in her official capacity rather than her union one. In the former, she said, “I think it’s probably fair to say that all of these motions are my fault”. I don’t think anyone took this too seriously, but Kerry acknowledged that, in a complex changing environ-ment, it is sometimes difficult to keep people as informed as you might want. She added that trainees and BLMs are represented in the various dis-cussions and if things weren’t being fed back this should be addressed. She concluded with an assurance that “the trainee experience will always be a primary consideration really.”

With no other speakersMO-TIONS 8 & 9 were carried.

Conference then moved to MOTION 10, which was a composite motion on trainee pay. Composites are rare birds at ARC and FDA conferences, but commonplace at the TUC and other union gatherings. When more than one motion comes in arguing essentially the same point with differ-ent wording, the conference organisers get the proposers together and try to achieve agreement on a motion which embodies all the points made in the separate motions. This composite brought together motions from seven Centres2 all essentially saying ‘why can’t TDP and equivalent

programmes have the same pay terms as the new BDDP, which leads to HO or SO rath-er than Grade 7, but whose members get the pay of the target grade from the begin-ning?’

Vicky Johnson apologised for not being a trainee and outlined the problem, quoting at length from an email sent by a trainee to the Tax Acad-emy. He recognised that Band T trainees would have better pay and prospects on even-tual promotion compared to BDDP trainees, but Vicky emphasised that – the mid-point pay rise negotiated by ARC excepted – they have to wait for it.

Eugene Mitchell, speaking for Glasgow Centre, praised the department’s variety of training courses but asked why there had to be this dif-ferential in the way pay was treated. “It’s not good, it’s not fair, and actually it can’t be terribly expensive for the de-partment given the numbers of people that we’re talking about”.

John Parkhouse speaking for Committee, supported the motion, saying that pass-ing the composite would arm Committee to go to the Tax Academy to put members’ views. Tamsin Wallbank for South and West Wales Centre pointed out that, training courses apart, we have exam-ples of people joining directly at Grade 7 who, although they would take some period of support to do the job, get Grade 7 pay from the outset.

With no other speakers Gareth called for votes and MOTION 10 was passed over-whelmingly.

2 West Midlands, Bristol, London Euston, Glas-gow, Liverpool, Manchester and North East.

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I asked for this slot to appear later in the day to avoid another speaker either side of lunch but also to give me time to watch and listen to today’s debates as they’ve unfolded and so provide me with an opportunity, if limited, to

reflect on emerging themes.I’ll come back to some of today’s main debates

and in particular the ongoing dispute later but I want to start by outlining ARC’s work in the past year in key areas, starting with pay.

PayThe Civil Service pay guidance for 2014-15 has not only reaffirmed the 1 per cent pay cap but also sets in stone the Budget announcement about the end of ‘automatic time-served progression pay in the Civil Service by 2015-16’. The guidance also makes clear that the Government plans to end pay progression in the wider public sector, including teachers, the health service and the police.

As we know, staff in HMRC have not had a contractual right to progression pay for some time and, while it gives me no pleasure to say this, the end of progression pay across the Civil Service means there is no chance of restoration of

automatic pay progression in HMRC. That is why the union’s work on equal pay is crucial,

As you heard in this morning’s presentation on equal pay from Helen and Terry, attempts to reach an agreement with HMRC on tackling equal pay tensions have failed and the employer is clear that it will resist our claims. That, and constraints on public sector spending, mean that progress is likely to be difficult and protracted. But we are determined to improve the pay position of all members. Our equal pay strategy forms a key part of that work and ARC has now lodged 34 Equal Pay claims with the Employment Tribunal. My thanks to ARC’s equal pay team and to every member who put themselves forward as a claim-ant or as a comparator.

Political Profile and Tax CampaigningOur political profile has never been higher. We’ve had key meetings with David Gauke, Exchequer Secretary to the Treasury, his shadow Catherine McKinnell MP and, when Catherine moved on, her successor Shabana Mahmood at a roundtable discussion on Labour’s policy review of Corporate Tax, where we added to previously submitted written evidence. I have also met the PAC Chair

KEYNOTE ADDRESS:

Gareth Hills ARC President

“Despite what some posting on arc-forum would have you believe, ARC mem-bers are not militant and taking indus-trial action does not come naturally to senior manag-ers and pro-fessionals.”


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Margaret Hodge. In September last year we hosted the Closing

the Tax Gap Parliamentary Event with ICAEW, ACCA and Taxation magazine. David Gauke MP, Catherine McKinnell MP, Stephen Williams MP – Chair of the Liberal Democrats Backbench Treasury Committee – and Richard Miller – CEO of Action Aid – all spoke, whilst Vanessa Houlder (tax correspondent at the Financial Times and tonight’s guest speaker at the dinner) expertly chaired the meeting. Each speaker thanked ARC for organising a meeting on such an important subject.

Our Public Understanding of Tax Group has brought together organisations from the wider tax field, including representatives from business and NGOs, bodies like Action Aid and Oxfam – you heard from the Oxfam Director Chris Johnes ear-lier – to demystify some of the larger misconcep-tions that dominate the public understanding of tax and the work of HMRC.

This work gives ARC a central stage to promote the professional role of our members and has influenced HMRC’s Spending Review settlements, which have been consistently more favourable than elsewhere on Whitehall. For example, HMRC came out of SR 2013 with an overall cut of 5% in contrast to the 10% inflicted elsewhere. That, and other, favourable settlements, reflect our campaign-ing and political work and mean that ARC has suc-cessfully protected the jobs of its members – from those in the North East to those in the South West and to those in the devolved administrations. That’s something I am very proud of.

Recruitment and OrganisationLast year I reported that our membership density had dropped to 58%. It now stands at 48%. That is disappointing, as was the fact that, completely at odds to the usual pattern experienced by all other unions, more members left ARC than joined following our decision to take industrial action.

Work in planning the dispute and industrial action identified significant architectural short-comings in the way we are organised. Paula Houghton will continue her excellent work on recruitment and organisation and will be work-ing with Committee Liaison Officers and Centre Officials on both.

A copy of the excellent FDA ‘Advocates Handbook’ was placed on each chair this morn-ing – it’s a great tool to help people recruit and overcome resistance from potential members. My challenge to each of you is to personally recruit at least three new members in the next 12 months.

Finally on organisation, London Centre has de-merged and reorganised into four centres

MOTIONS 11-17

PMRAs might have been expected, PMR produced an indignant but united debate at the AGM, with motions attacking PMR from a number of different angles.

The PMR session kicked off with MOTION 11 from Com-mittee, opposing any quota ‘however described’ and criti-cising many aspects of PMR by listing the characteristics that a fair and transparent system should display. It was

proposed by Tony Wallace with a combination of ‘more in sorrow than in anger’ and a fair bit of anger. Pointing out the contradiction between HMRC’s performance and the idea that ten per cent of its staff must improve, he said “Last year HMRC’s compli-ance interventions delivered an extra 20.7 billion pounds into the coffers of the Excheq-uer. That’s enough to fund the cost of primary health care for the whole of the UK.” He poured scorn on the quota “The employer may claim that that was never the intention of the system. But if you con-tinually direct people to find ten per cent and if you have meetings where people are told that nobody goes home until ten percent are found, then guess what? You’ll find ten percent.”

The motion, he said, was “designed to set our blueprint for what we as an organisa-tion believe are the hallmarks of a good system of manage-ment. One in which staff can have confidence that mark-ings are based on their actual performance; one free from discriminatory impact on protected groups; and one

properly resourced to allow managers to spend time sup-porting the staff. It’s a system of management which can mend a broken heart.” Repre-sentatives applauded warmly.

Tim Lintott for Brighton Centre, while not opposing the motion, suggested that we should focus on specific weak-nesses of the current system as well, opposing them if necessary. Steve Dodd from Leeds Centre disagreed, say-ing that this was not a tacti-cal motion so it was not the place to address Tim’s points. He urged unreserved support for the Committee motion as it addressed all the points which members wanted ad-

dressed. David McDowell of 100 PS Centre thanked Tony for his critique of PMR and also supported the motion, but wanted to ask how Com-mittee would respond to a re-fusal by senior management to address our concerns. “I think there’s more to be done on strategy and tactics and I’d be grateful if Committee would come forward before next year’s meeting on those points.”

The Committee motion was passed overwhelmingly.

MOTION 12 from South and West Wales Centre focused on the mid-year outturn for peo-ple with protected character-istics and called on Commit-tee to ensure that ExCom take steps to ensure no-one suf-fered in this way at the year



– 100 PS, London BCD (Bush House, Custom House and Dorset House), London Euston and London South. My thanks to the individuals who have taken on key roles in each of those and for the work they’ve started to ensure they become vibrant and healthy centres.

CommunicationsThere’s been an interesting debate on this today. ARC’s multi-channel communications strategy using updates, direct emails, arcnews, twitter, our internet blog, mailboxes and face-to-face meetings is one I am extremely proud of and is liked and respected by members. We do communicate, we do listen. But what I will say is that listening and communicating doesn’t equate to ‘we all have to agree’ – we don’t.

In the past year we have carried out the biggest membership consultation exercise ever undertak-en by this union. Committee members attended three rounds of consultative meetings at each of our (then) 26 centres where hundreds of you shared your views on issues that matter to you.

The ideas you shared with us at those consul-tative meetings fed into and laid the foundations of our Business Plan helping shape its focus on member priorities and Putting Members First. I introduced the role of Committee Liaison Officer to strengthen the link from Committee through to individual members. That role and those links need to develop to continue the vital work of Committee finding and listening to the authentic voice of ARC.

Changes to CommitteeThere’s a big turnover on ARC Committee with quite a few of the current members standing down including, in Mark Bingham and Marie Hardy, two-thirds of our Diversity and Inclusion team. My thanks to Mark and Marie and to all outgoing Committee members for their hard work over the past two years.

It’s always good to see fresh faces – we appear to have a bit of a North East takeover – but I’m personally sad to be saying goodbye to two stal-warts of ARC – Martin Fletcher and Terry Cook.

Both of them have given sterling service to both ARC and FDA. Martin has spent decades as ARC’s Treasurer, has been a long serving mem-ber of FDA EC and was also FDA President. I was fortunate to be Terry’s deputy when he was President and although he has not been on Committee for the past two years Terry played a key role in our equal pay work and in the reorgan-isation of London Centre. We all have much to thank both Terry and Martin for and I wish them all the best for their future.

Debbie Stamper is moving on from the job she’s had as the President’s assistant for the past few years to return to a role in HMRC. Debbie has given me fantastic support; she’s been my sense checker and my conscience. On a personal level I will miss Debbie greatly and although it sounds clichéd I can honestly say that ARC’s loss is definitely HMRC’s gain.

Now to themes from today and our dispute. Three months on to the day from our Valentine’s Day of action and there has been no move-ment from HMRC on either PMR or Terms and Conditions.

Committee Liaison Officers and Centre Officials have been working hard to gather data on the degree of membership support for Action Short of Strike and the effect it is having in dis-rupting the business of the employer. But despite that hard work the patchiness of responses means that Committee remains unsighted and unsure of levels of participation and the impact of our action. If you haven’t already done so please fill in the ASOS health check questionnaires placed on your seats and post them in the box at the rear of the hall.

As with so many of the issues debated today we need to be honest with ourselves and recog-nise that the current challenging and difficult environment is not going to change no matter what happens in the coming election. More CSEP policies are on their way, we know that aus-terity measures and public sector pay constraint are not about to magically disappear, they are with us until at least 2018.

The question is, knowing and understand-ing the makeup of our membership, how should ARC and FDA react to such challenges? Should we stick our fingers in our ears and refuse to engage, or listen to calls to ballot members on industrial action over all and sundry? Or should we recognise that as a small union representing senior managers and professionals we best serve members’ interests by keeping a constructive relationship with the employer, one we can use to put forward credible and compelling arguments to influence and shape decisions as we’ve done so successfully?

Because as things stand with our current dis-pute, not only are we the only section of FDA taking action over Civil Service Reform changes to PMR and T&Cs, we are also the only Civil Service union taking action – that includes PCS, Prospect and now Unison. ARC has around 2,400 members out of an FDA membership of 21,000 and the wider constituency of around 500,000 Civil Servants. 2,400 standing alone.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not opposed to


end. Tamsin Wallbank, pro-posing, said that she would just like to quote some statis-tics, and then ran through the mid-year figures for full-time against part-time, ethnic mi-nority against the white ma-jority, etc. “Those people who aren’t disabled, who aren’t disabled yet or who don’t put themselves down as disabled: exceeded 15.5%, must im-prove 8.7. Those who are disa-bled, who declare themselves as such, exceeded 11.4%, must improve 13.4. If you are disabled you are more likely to get a must improve than you are get an exceed.” Mark Bingham, speaking “passion-ately in support” of the mo-tion for Committee, said that ARC had warned Lin Homer across the table of these out-comes last year. He accused the department of “putting its head in the sand” and of “playing politics with equality, not for the first time.” The mo-tion was easily carried when put to the vote.

Manchester Centre’s MO-TION 13 expressed concern at breaches of the HMRC guid-ance and ExCom’s reluctance to admit to the quota, urging Committee to continue its data gathering and to use the facts to discredit the system.

Lucy Bradley introduced her-self as a recent graduate of TPDP suddenly put into an indirect tax policy job – with a witty story of trying to explain the make up of real cider to Oliver Letwin – and manage-ment. Her team were lovely, she said, with much more policy experience than her, but “it’s no exaggeration to say that the only part of my work that’s made me truly anxious at times this year, truly given me that feeling of dread on a Sunday night, was the part where pressure was put on me to put ten percent of my staff into the must improve catego-ry.” She had no problem with a robust PMR system or with

challenging conversations. “But I do have a problem with rewriting objectives to set peo-ple up to fail. The department calls it ‘recalibrating expecta-tions’; I call it picking off our vulnerable staff and telling them they’re in the bottom ten percent.” The applause that greeted this speech was enough to discourage other speakers and the motion went straight to an overwhelming vote in favour.

MOTION 14 from London BCD Centre concentrated its fire on the bureaucracy and resource needs of PMR. Peter Horne, proposing, said “the managers with more than ten staff seem to spend all their time in PMR meetings.” It was the worst system he had seen in all his years in the department. Unfortunately the motion concluded with a call for Committee to oppose PMR systems in principle, and this led Loz Hutton, speak-ing for Committee, to oppose it. ARC had never opposed performance management in principle, although it opposed aspects of the current sys-tem. Peter fought back with a proposal to remit, so that the objection to bureaucracy would be taken forward, but in the debate on remission he

was opposed by Graham Flew for Committee whose whole speech (apart from introduc-ing himself) “The motion’s wrong oppose it please” drew laughter from the AGM. Liz Robertson (Liverpool Centre) backed Committee opposition to remission and to the mo-tion and the AGM duly voted against remission and against the motion itself.

MOTION 15 produced an-other tussle over remission, this time starting with the proposer of the motion in his opening speech. The motion read: That this AGM instructs Committee to resist any link between pay and perfor-mance until such time as the

industrial action but neither voting for it nor tak-ing it is an end in itself. When used on the right issue industrial action can be a tool to deliver results for members – but only if the action successfully shifts the employer’s stance on the issues in dispute. Despite what some posting on arc-forum would have you believe, ARC members are not militant and taking industrial action does not come naturally to senior managers and profes-sionals.

It’s no coincidence that the next block of motions, as with so many today, tasks the incom-ing Committee to ‘engage with the employer’, ‘to enter into dialogue with HMRC’, ‘to negotiate with HMRC’. That’s what this union is good at and is how ARC successfully delivers results for members. But as we have found, the union’s abil-ity to engage with the employer in any meaning-ful way is strained, almost to the point of being impossible, during times of industrial dispute and action.

Decisions on the future of the dispute will be for the new Committee but must be informed by accurate data and evidence – so, another plea to complete the questionnaire and to respond to information request from your Centres.

Despite the challenging times Tony and his new Committee will continue the work of ensur-ing the union represents members, influences and shapes decisions, gets the authentic voice of ARC heard and Puts Members First.

Just a quick word about Tony, I’ve been lucky to have him as my Deputy and we have worked very closely together over the last two years – leading to allegations of a bromance! Not sure about that, but I’ll let you in to a secret – this time two years ago we entered into a pact: to always look smart and professional when meet-ing members or the employer. I’m confident that we achieved that even if it did mean that (on far too many occasions for my liking) we’ve had to contact each other the night before meetings to check on our attire for the next day to ensure we didn’t clash or wear something too similar – men of a certain age with their grey suits and striped ties and all that!

Tony, you’ve been a great pal to me over the past two years and I thank you for your support – I couldn’t have done it without you. I don’t need to wish you luck because I know you are the right person for the job. You and your Committee will have my full support over the next two years and I’m sure you’ll have the support of everyone in this room and the wider membership.

I’ll finish now – it’s been my pleasure and privilege to have served as ARC President. Thank you

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Firstly, thanks to Mark George for selflessly suggesting I that write the “conference virgin” piece, putting his own qualification for this task to one side. What follows is a short introduction on me, a brief over-

view of events and some personal reflections on some of the detail.

Who am I?I am a CRM in LB Liverpool and have been a member of ARC since joining HMRC from PwC nearly ten years ago. I joined ARC mainly because I felt it was the only way I could have any say in my terms and conditions. While, particularly at present, that say might seem a somewhat hollow benefit given the stance of our employers, it still seems better than none at all. Given the withdrawal of facilities time this year, I decided to show a bit more active support and attend both ARC and FDA conferences for the first time. I also had the luxury of some TOIL to burn.

Conference overviewThe delegate experience started with the pre- conference quiz. After years of mid-table obscu-rity, Margaret Hepburn’s deeply impressive knowl-edge of pioneering women gave the “Desperate Scousewives” team a significant lead that proved unassailable, despite abject performances on films and flooding. Our prize of a bottle of wine each at the dinner was gratefully received.

John Parkhouse ran a really helpful session for newbies shortly before the conference opened. Process and procedure were explained and ques-tions answered. During conference there was lively and genuine debate, including thoughtful contributions from the floor which helped me make up my mind on some finely balanced issues. Terry Cook and Helen Baird-Parker’s excellent update on the equal pay action gave a stark view of the current position of the employer, who is refusing to accept the findings of the independent arbiter and thus acknowledge and tackle the pay equality problem.

ARC dinnerThe speeches were kept short and there was a chance to chat to a few people I hadn’t seen for a while. Energy and enthusiasm were the primary qualifications for the dance floor (fortunately). Miraculously avoiding the hangover I truly deserved, I made it to the FDA conference on time, and lasted ‘til the bitter end.

ReflectionsFDA is quite different from ARC. At ARC the Chair clearly signposted interdependencies between motions, including prior to the vote. Delegates were helped to an informed decision. At FDA you are expected to know process and procedure and you can’t rely on the Chair to iden-tify this. For example voting to accept subscription changes, meant no vote took place on an ARC Glasgow motion to increase a band. This interac-tion was flagged in a paper issued in advance of the meeting, but not mentioned on the day.

While FDA were procedurally right, it didn’t feel particularly engaging. This led me to wonder whether we could be more collectively joined up as ARC attending FDA – perhaps a session at ARC conference (at lunch, at the end?) to review “our” motions for FDA and maybe be a bit more procedurally clued up as well.

I didn’t expect to be in the rather bizarre position of hearing both ARC and FDA Committees arguing against motions asking for better communication with the member-ship. At ARC conference I would guess that the wording of the motion contributed to Committee’s stance. At FDA, the Executive Committee appeared to treat the motion as requesting a forum similar to ARC forum, as this was an exam-ple given of two-way communications. In speaking against the motion, the EC used usage stats to paint a picture of the forum as a haven for a vocal minority, lunatic fringe.

While in each case the motions were car-ried, the debate raised some questions over how we engage and communicate. I regularly review postings on the Forum; it is a good source of

First impressionsEach year we traditionally ask a first-time AGM representative to give their impression of conference. This year Ros Shaw from Liverpool Centre describes her experiences of attending both FDA and ARC’s annual meetings for the first time.


information both official and unofficial. I have posted perhaps once in 10 years. Having heard the debate at FDA though, I wonder if I can con-tinue this passive engagement with the forum if I want this valuable resource not to be sidelined as a small club for a radical minority.

I got a sense of how serving on Committee may well seem both a lonely and a thankless task, particularly in such difficult times. The importance of being supportive throughout the year came across strongly for me – even in small ways such as making sure contact/office details are up to date can make a huge difference in the amount of effort Committee has to put into admininstration at the expense of more substantive issues.

At both ARC and FDA time was given for external speakers. They were all interesting and informative, and certainly for ARC, intended to mitigate the loss of facilities time. However, I heard mixed views on this, the chief question being whether it is the business of annual confer-ence to be presented to. At FDA, after lunch, shorter timings were imposed on those speaking to motions, in part to accommodate moving the furniture for “question time”. Prioritising delivered content over member debate didn’t feel the right call to me, but that’s just my view. Perhaps this is something Centres could feedback to Committee (as part of the improved two-way communications we voted for?) to help in planning for next year.

Opinions on one motion became sharply polarised over whether a union should help members leave. This was defeated, but hopefully, for the sake of some of our members, Committee should not have to wait for a mandate to remind the department of the need to be a “good modern employer”, offering genuine profes-sional support and guidance to staff who will have nowhere to work in HMRC. There is a significant difference between choosing to leave and hav-ing no choice but to leave and, on reflection, the debate didn’t really capture this.

A final thought: I was surprised that the FDA meeting was described as a “packed conference”. It felt more like we were barely quorate (60 souls), particularly in the afternoon. While it might seem deeply masochistic to volun-teer to attend FDA rather than ARC conference on your own time, we perhaps need to be a bit more focused on this as Centres if we want to improve the relationship with the wider union.

In summary I’m glad I went and would definitely go again. In advance the thought of being stuck in a conference for two days seemed really quite dull. It genuinely wasn’t, deepened my under-standing of union business and I would encourage other non-activist members to take the plunge and represent your centre

PMR system is replaced with a system which is demonstra-bly fair, transparent and does not impose any quota on staff who are unfairly badged as

failing in their work. Iain Cam-eron, proposing for Edinburgh Centre, had been warned that Committee would oppose on the grounds that the words ‘until such time as’ implied an acceptance of the princi-ple of performance related pay, so he got his retaliation in first and sought remission of the motion. “The spirit of this motion is to acknowledge that the aim of Cabinet Office is for performance pay to be attached to this specific PMR system but to argue against that being done because this system is so dysfunctional.”

Liz Robertson came to the podium again, this time to support remission, but Gra-ham Flew for Committee opposed it – “it is wrong in principle and I’ll tell you why when we get there.” The AGM was clearly eager to hear Gra-ham’s argument as it rejected remission and Graham came back to the podium. The issue was the principle of accepting performance pay if PMR was seen to be fair. “We are against performance pay, we remain against performance pay, even if we had a fair system of PMR we would still be against a link to pay and performance.” Iain Cameron effectively conceded defeat in his right of reply, saying “I’m not going to bleed if you vote against it” and the motion was duly lost.

Continuing the theme of individual motions picking bits of PMR and roasting them over a hot fire, MOTION 16 from North East Centre attacked the pejorative terminology of PMR, especially the use of the term ‘must improve’ and called on Committee to engage with HMRC to produce language which better reflected per-formance and development needs. Andrew Miller, propos-ing the motion, attacked the

effect on morale of using the description ‘must improve’ for those in the bottom ten per cent. He concluded with some suggested alternatives: “I did come up with some alterna-tives to help Committee: ‘worst of the best’, or ‘quite good but 90% were better’”, both of which were greeted with de-lighted laughter from the as-sembled representatives. Fran Hunter from 100 PS Centre chipped in with a supporting speech in which she said she had been shocked at a Hotseat reply which made clear that a ‘must improve’ marking would have to be communicated to a potential future employer in any reference. The motion was passed overwhelmingly.

MOTION 17 was also from North East Centre, and called on Committee to engage with HMRC to establish the cost of

PMR. Nicola Clarke was suc-cinct in her proposing speech. “Hours and hours have been spent in preparing mid year assessments, preparing for meetings with managers – on a monthly basis sometimes – and at a time when resource is really tight, we’re stretched, there are more demands on us than ever before, it just can’t be right.” No one disa-greed with this and the mo-tion was immediately passed.

And that concluded a good humoured but passionate debate in which the over-whelming impression was the indignation of members at the manifest unfairness of the imposed PMR system.

Motions 11-17 were all passed.

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MOTIONS 18-27

Pay and GradingA batch of motions in common debate dealt with the vexed issues of pay freezes, pay caps and lack of progression.

MOTION 18 from London BCD Centre called on Com-mittee to engage with HMRC to secure acknowledgement of the pay differential with the private sector and the equal pay problem between men and women at ARC grades, and to publicise these matters if HMRC re-fuses to play ball. A final bullet point seeking a bal-lot on industrial action was removed by a Committee amendment which London BCD accepted and the AGM

endorsed. Andy Mill there-fore proposed the motion as amended. He described the effects of pay restraint over the last five years and the equal pay problem. “We’ve seen no evidence that HMRC are prepared to address that in any meaningful way. Is it any wonder that our morale is so low and that we’re start-ing to see members leave for the private sector?” Turning to London BCD’s proposed remedies, he suggested “promoting the findings of the Hay Group report in the media, and also promoting in the media the disparity between the real-term cuts in pay for our members and the benefits our members bring to the UK. In 2012-13 HMRC generated £20.7 billion of compliance yield, around £2 billion over target, a large part of that by ARC mem-bers. Yet selling our story is never going to be straightfor-ward, we’re never going to feature high in the popular-ity stakes.” Andy ended by

speculating whether, given the new public focus on taxa-tion, Gareth Hills might beat Gary Barlow in the popular-ity stakes.

Andy was followed to the podium by Mark Bingham (Committee), who began by thanking London BCD for accepting the Committee amendment. He wholly en-dorsed the motion, and men-tioned that Committee were already engaged on the twin track approach suggested in it.

MOTION 19 from Commit-tee called for engagement on the private sector differential and for HMRC to prepare jointly with ARC a business case for proper reward for scarce senior professionals

in the department. Paula Houghton, for Committee, described the pay system as “unfair, discriminatory, and utterly opaque” adding “the first word I wrote there was ‘bonkers’ but I decided that might not be appropri-ate”. She continued with a warning to the department about the demographic time bomb ticking away, and the danger of a pay system which might not retain staff when the economy picks up. On the differential with the private sector she said “the justification for it in the past was centred on our gold plated pensions, our favour-able terms and conditions, and our job security. Well we all know what’s happened to those things. What little goodwill is left, the pride in the profession, the pride in

public service, the willing-ness to serve your country, no matter how badly you’re treated, is rapidly waning.” Paula stood down to general applause.

Len Jacobs then moved MOTION 20 from Bristol Cen-tre, attacking the unequal pay results of the lack of pay progression and warn-ing of the danger of loss of experienced staff to the pri-vate sector. It particularly attacked HMRC’s refusal to honour its previous com-mitment to pay progression from the minimum to the maximum in eight years. Len spoke only about the auster-ity programme’s effect on progression pay, pleading for new terminology to enable the necessary movement to take place.

Liverpool Centre’s MOTION 21 called for clear criteria for grading work, using JEGS, and ensuring that work is not inappropriately downgraded.

Amy Carr began by acknowl-edging the work that Mark Bingham on Committee had been doing on JEGS, adding that she herself was in “a role that until a few years ago was a Grade 6 role and it’s now a Grade 7 role.” She quoted ex-amples from Large Business where cases with an SCS CRM now had a Grade 6 one, and those previously dealt with at Grade 6 were now dealt with at Grade 7.

West Midland Centre’s MOTION 22 called for a re-tention policy for those on


the tax professional training courses to ensure they do not leave for better salaries on

qualification. Vicky Johnson, proposing, said that the mo-tion was looking at both pay and succession planning. “We bring them in, we train them up, we promote them to Grade 7, and we pay them Grade 7 minimum. And then that’s it. There is no progres-sion pay, whatever you call it, we’ve got a PMR system that’s widely derided, and no proper career management.”

Vicky was back to propose MOTION 23 from the West Midlands Centre immediately afterwards. This motion de-plored Bob Kerslake’s blog comment that progression pay was a thing of the past and called on Committee to find ways with HMRC to properly reward members for the skills and experi-ence they build up in their grade. “I speak to a motion like this every year, it’s like Groundhog Day,” she said. She illustrated her argument with the tale of two trainees who, because of the pension levy, found their take-home pay situations reversed, the earlier one just tripping a higher level of pension levy and getting her take-home pay reduced to below that of the later trainee, despite her additional experience. Vicky accepted that the levy was as much to blame as the pay system, but her message that the pay freeze was the under-lying cause got home.

MOTION 24 from South and West Wales Centre was the shortest and simplest of the day, so I can quote it in full: That this AGM urges Committee to continue to press the department to agree pay progression inde-

pendent of negotiated pay settlements.

Tamsin Wallbank’s speech was as short and succinct as her motion and can again be quoted in full: “Hello again. It is very like Groundhog Day; I think I proposed this motion last year and the year before. What’s the point of a pay scale if you’re not going to have progression? Thank you very much.”

Ben Proctor got a laugh

with his first line, proposing Manchester’s MOTION 25 urging Committee to work jointly with the employer to find ways to ensure that we can recruit and retain from the private sector and keep our internally trained pro-fessionals. He opened with “Conference I’ll begin with a hello, first time attending and a speaker, but I’m also here to say goodbye, because after ten years in HMRC, seven as an ARC member, I’ve a confession to make: I’m leaving to join the dark side.” Pausing only to out himself as Ben from arc-forum, he described a recent Large Business recruitment exercise for external profes-sionals in which “a total of about 55 people have been recruited, when about 150 were sought”.

MOTION 26 came from my own Centre, London Euston, demanding that HMRC at least be honest in recruit-ment advertisements and make it clear that the pay scale is unclimbable. Linda Ridgers-Waite asked Com-mittee “to go away and make sure that HMRC gives the correct details of starting pay, and that it may also be your ending pay, and also an explanation of how the current pay system works in practice. However that is drafted I reckon that will be

an embarrassing story for HMRC to tell.”

MOTION 27 was also short and straightforward, seeking a consolidated pay rise for all members in the current pay round. Colin McHardy, (Committee, but speaking for his Centre, Glasgow) looked back at the last pay round “We’ve just come out of a pay freeze for the last couple of years, when we did come out the pay freeze last year we all realised the niggardly one percent pay pot wasn’t suf-ficient to do very much. So expectations were pretty low. But even from that low base the department managed to disappoint.” He pointed out that the non-consolidated rise for those on the maxi-mum would disappear at the end of May. “That’s simply an additional undeserved slap in the face to long-serving and dedicated staff and, for the ones close to retirement, that will impact on their in-come for the rest of their life so it’s just not on.” Colin’s

closing comments were ad-dressed to HMRC as much as the AGM: “whatever miserly amount we’re offered this year, and I don’t think we’re under any illusions it’s going to be anything other than miserly, at least consolidate it please and don’t insult us.”

At this point all the mo-tions had been proposed and the AGM entered into com-mon debate on all of them. Mark Bingham focused on the Liverpool motion, men-tioning his work on JEGS and expressing confidence that someone else would be tak-ing this forward when he stepped down from Commit-tee at the end of the AGM.

Mick Lett (Committee) is fa-mous, among other things, for ensuring that there is an an-nual mention of death at the AGM – he called it the Grim

Reaper. So he raised a real laugh from the AGM with his intervention: “It’s great to see some young faces out there, I do feel sorry for you though because, especially the train-ees, you will get promoted to the Grade 7 minimum and you have no idea when you’re going to retire so you could actually be on the Grade 7 minimum till you die.” Point-ing out that many members would leave survivor benefits when they do die, he went on “not only will that cause you suffering during your lifetime… your pension can outlive you. So it continues after your death. So you’re getting ripped off during your lifetime, at the point of death, and after death.”

Tim Lintott, from Brighton Centre, quoted several titles from ‘The Hit Parade’, the legacy of his children trying to up his cool Dad rating by buying him a compilation album. He warned HMRC of the danger of underperform-ing the pay market. “This is something that HMRC needs to be very careful about; what it’s doing for the future. Tax professionals have sud-denly become very impor-tant to the government, who have given significant, poten-tially controversial, powers to HMRC. HMRC will need top grade people to use these powers; it will need highly motivated individuals to use them properly. If they cannot reward them, if they cannot retain them, then they will find themselves failing in a very serious position.”

Tim’s contribution turned out to be the last of the debate. After Gareth Hills thanked him with the com-ment that his own five-year-old daughter would be morti-fied that Tim’s recital of pop song titles had omitted any mention of One Direction. Gareth then put the motions to the vote one-by-one and they were all carried.

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Introduction by Iain CampbellChris has been a central member of the group on public understanding which Gareth’s writ-ten about and spoken about and we’re very glad to welcome Chris here this afternoon. A little bit of background: Chris is currently the direc-tor of Oxfam’s UK programme and for the last three years he’s led the Oxfam anti poverty work in the United Kingdom. That’s a mixture of grass roots programme work and national cam-paigning focussing on two main themes, one is on food poverty and the other on inequal-ity. Before he took up that role he led Oxfam’s work in Wales which had three main elements: campaigning on climate change, lobbying for better access to education and the third, which may be more of a surprise for everybody, was opening fashion shops.

You can probably tell I don’t spend too much time shopping at the fashion shops either. I have to apologise before I start, at about ten o’clock this morning the frog jumped into my throat and hasn’t

got out yet so if I pause to drink lots of water during this short talk that’s the reason why.

I’m going to do a couple of things while I’m here this afternoon, I’m going to talk about why Oxfam is working on tax in the UK and why we think it’s increasingly important for tackling pov-erty and inequality, and I’ll explain briefly how that connects with our global work which is of course much more well known. I hope I’m not going to cause too many palpitations to either Gareth or Iain by introducing a couple of figures we think are heroes in the tax justice debate – and they may not be people that everyone here agrees with – and talk a little bit about where we think tax campaigning needs to go next.

I’m going to start very quickly talking about why Oxfam works in the UK. We’ve actually worked in the UK since the mid 1990s, when we had a serious recession in the UK, and as we came out of that in the second half of the decade a lot of communities and a lot of people were left behind. We had sustained high unemployment and we had some of the rhetoric we’ve been hearing over the last few years, blaming people in poverty for their own situation, and that was the reason why

KEYNOTE ADDRESS:

Chris Johnes Director, UK Poverty Programme OXFAM


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MOTIONS 28-30

Estates Discontent with the state of our buildings and the possible solutions was the theme of this debate, with London leading the complaints but receiving strong support from the AGM.

It was perhaps no surprise that 100 PS Centre loomed large in the Estates debate. The session kicked off with MOTION 28 from our largest Centre demanding the rein-statement of the 8:10 ratio of desks to people, 100 PS hav-ing slipped below this recent-

ly. Jon Clarke began by say-ing that, although he didn’t like desk-sharing, the motion didn’t seek its abolition, but the restoration of the prom-ised ratio of 8:10. He referred to the infamous ‘re-stack’. “This left us at the time with a staff to desk ratio of 6½ desks to every 10 staff. ARC and PCS were, at the time, promised that the building would be back to an 8:10 ratio by the end of March this year. Now as if the stresses of doing the work with fewer and fewer staff were not enough, sort-ing out a place to sit every day is now another thing that we have to worry about.” He added, to much laughter from the AGM, “ideally I’d like eve-ryone who wants their own desk to have one, and in fact I have some high-level support for that because as far as I know, all of the directors’ pri-vate offices in 100 PS have a desk to staff ratio of 1:1.”

John Parkhouse for Commit-tee then got up to seek remis-sion. He said that this was not

a problem restricted to 100 PS and that generally ARC seeks to deal with these problems at a local level. “We ask you to consider remitting it, not because I don’t accept there’s a problem, not because we don’t want to help with the problem, but because we don’t want this to be just a 100 Parliament Street mo-tion.” He promised that Com-mittee would seek to deal with Jon’s concerns through the Centre and its Centre Liai-son Officer. Jon Clarke spoke against remission, protesting that it would have been nice to have had some warning of Committee’s intention, and pointing out that local solu-tions had not worked because there had been no contact between the Centre and their SRM who was Edward Troupe.

When the vote on remission was held Gareth thought it was carried, but it was close enough for him to seek the aid of the scrutineers. On a counted vote remission was lost. Without further speak-ers the motion was put to the vote and was carried.

MOTION 29 also came from London, this time Lon-don BCD Centre. It sought greater compliance from Mapeley with its contractual obligations. Peter Horne re-

Oxfam decided to invest in work in the UK – to try and address some of those issues and to raise awareness that poverty could be as severe in the UK as it could be elsewhere. We’re not alone in that actually, many of the organisations working on overseas aid in the UK also have domestic programmes; Save the Children do, Christian Aid funds a lot of work that other people do, as does CAFOD. But looking forward, sixteen or seven-teen years after that decision to work in the UK, it looks far more natural than it did even then. Partly because global poverty has changed a lot, increas-ingly apart from the very poorest countries like Chad or the Democratic Republic of Congo, we see the differences within countries are as seri-ous as the differences between countries. When you’ve got places like India officially becoming a middle-income country, but having more poor people than anywhere else in the world, the idea that you can designate a country as poor seems to me to be an increasing anachronism and many of the other members of our own Oxfam family, and there are seventeen Oxfams across the world, also have domestic programmes in their country.

But our work on tax did start with our global work. In many ways tax receipts as we think about them in the UK are an absolutely fundamental tool of development. And for poorer countries, particularly in the more successful ones, being able to generate their own tax receipts is one of the strongest signs of successful development. The fact that a country no longer needs aid to fund its education system or its hospitals is a really positive sign and one that shows that its economy is on a sustainable basis. You could also describe it as an important stepping stone in moving from being an officially lower-income country to being an official middle-income country. And for us, one of the best things HMRC has done – and I’m not sure if any ARC members have been involved in this – has been giving support to poorer countries to develop their own tax systems so that they have the ability to move away from dependency on aid. And that’s a form of very clever aid that we welcome and have supported.

However, there is a but. And it’s a very large but. It doesn’t apply universally but it applies in far too many countries and this won’t come as a surprise to you that tax collection in many develop-ing countries is very ineffective. And it’s particularly ineffective in those countries which are dependent on extractives – oil, gold, other precious minerals

“Oxfam decided to invest in work in the UK – to try and raise awareness that poverty could be as severe in the UK as it could be elsewhere.”



– because a lot of the tax that should be paid isn’t being paid. Some of that is not being paid through illegal means, quite a lot by both corporations and of course most notoriously by the rulers of many of those countries, a lot of the money is going into secrecy havens, but quite a lot of money is not being paid through perfectly legal means, transfer pricing possibly being the most notorious. Now this has been an issue that NGOs have been worried about globally for quite some time now. Our col-leagues in Christian Aid have been working on this for over a decade, exposing the lack of tax receipts, what that means for development in poorer coun-tries, and of course the role of tax havens in mak-ing that possible. And one of the most significant things about this which has had a big impact in the UK has been the beginnings of a shift in debate about tax. For many years, when we talked about tax we were talking about what should the correct tax rate be, what’s the best way of making a fair society or providing enough receipts or encouraging business. But actually we’re now into a different kind of debate; that’s still relevant, but about how we best collect tax, what are the rules and systems in place to do that. And in terms of developing countries it’s the collection of tax as much as the superficial tax policies which are critical.

But assuming that this has been a problem for developing countries alone is being rather naive and that is in a sense the fault of many of the campaigning organisations including our own. Because the reality is that most tax secrecy regimes are actually one way or another controlled by developed nations, most multinational corpora-tions are headquartered in developed nations and of course most of the people with the financial skills to help you get round the rules perfectly legally are western financial experts. So when you look at that you have to ask why wouldn’t tax receipts in developed countries start being subject to the same pressures as those in low income countries. And of course there are some barriers: you yourselves are one of the key ones, efficient tax collecting systems do mitigate the impact, but it doesn’t mean that that whole lot of opportuni-ties, secrecy jurisdictions, complex international tax rules, aren’t going to have plenty of holes that can be exploited. And when you put that next to the kinds of policy debate we’ve had on interna-tional trade and investment over the last ten years where we’ve had a very liberal open approach and governments very keen to compete for the

location of businesses, that exacerbates those stresses even more. Because in terms of the com-petition for multinational investment, tax is always going to be a weapon and we see it most obviously in things like levels of corporation tax in places like Luxembourg or the Republic of Ireland but then it’s moved on from that, the types of com-petition and has gone away from the visible ele-ments of tax rates into the more subtle creation of tax competitive regimes and you could argue that most UK governments over the last twenty years have been very attuned to that that kind of subtle competition. But it’s not something that’s hit the radar of public and political debate. And even things like Swiss bank accounts for a long time have just been either the subject of jokes or where the outrage has been developed it’s been about their record in hiding the assets of holocaust vic-tims rather than recognising they’re actually hid-ing the assets for a lot of other people as well.

Perhaps one of the surprises has been that the debate has taken so long to come to the fore in the UK. And what brought it out was the 2008 recession and its fallout. And then, most notably, what that led to and the very different experiences of different parts of our population. And this is where I come to my first hero of the tax debate which is UK Uncut. Not necessarily the most policy-sophisticated organisation, but they have done a lot to raise awareness of the behaviour of certain companies and certain tax practices and to channel a degree of rage and unhappiness by people who felt they’d really been let down by and squeezed out by the system, particularly young people. I would say we wouldn’t be where we are in the tax debate without their actions, even going so far as without their sit-ins without their media-savviness. Because what they’ve done really interestingly is not only shown an inequality in financial outcomes they’ve also indirectly exposed an inequality in process. And anybody who’s seen their YouTube stunt of their ambush of Dave Hartnett will have seen how this was illustrated

“And I recognise that some of you might wince at the phrase ‘tax dodging’, it’s a great piece of Oxfam-speak but an appalling piece of tax professional-speak because it means absolutely nothing.”


called previous references to Groundhog Day and pointed out that he had been at the podium before about Bush House. “In the last few years you’ve heard about our mice, you’ve heard about the state of our water. [Laughter] This time we’re just talking about the general state of the build-ing. We never seem to get Mapeley to actually do any-thing. We had a broken light in our gent’s toilet. It was reported in October 2013, it was finally repaired last week; it’s a minor victory I sup-pose… When we had those big storms at the beginning of the year we had leaking windows all round the building. Mape-

ley’s solution? Put toilet tissue along the windowsill!”

Fran Hunter, also from Lon-don BCD, supported Peter, saying this was not just about Bush House. She had also heard about the situation in Cardiff “where the condensa-tion is so bad there are little trays under the windows where staff have put floating

plastic ducks.” Eugene Mitch-ell, for Committee, supported the motion but pointed out that HMRC is making efforts to ensure compliance with the contract, and building unavailability had reduced since 2012-13. The debate concluded with a short in-tervention from Ben Barnett (Manchester) “I was just going

to say. Don’t let me get started on the lifts in Albert Bridge House in Manchester.” Which concluded the debate with laughter and the motion was passed.

100 PS were back again with MOTION 30, seeking a joint review with the depart-ment of the issues thrown up by remote and home work-ing as potential cures for the problems of the estate. Jon Clarke began with the hope that this motion would be less controversial that his last. He went on to enumerate prob-lems with home and remote working. “Season tickets are normally only economical if you use them five days a week, so travelling can be-come very expensive; when you work at home you’re pay-ing for extra heating and light-ing, the department doesn’t have any health and safety obligations around your work-ing environment when you’re at home, so you can be sat on the settee with your lap-top wrecking your back, and I know about that. Finding a desk in other HMRC loca-tions or other government departments is becoming more and more difficult I be-lieve, as the pressure on desks spreads through the country and, most commonly of all, laptops and IT are often a big problem; there aren’t enough laptops and the IT isn’t always reliable connecting remotely.”

Colin McHardy, supporting the motion for Committee, also mentioned the incon-sistency around remote and home working; in Large Busi-ness you might be told that you have to be in the office to show leadership. When Gareth put the matter to the vote Jon’s hope was fulfilled and the motion received an uncontroversial endorsement from the AGM.

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even more clearly, it’s been about inequality in the way policies are made, inequality of access to power. If we think back to Tony Blair’s rather notorious breakfasts with city leaders on pension tax changes, the way that some of the consultative groups on corporation tax had been formulated, and even at times back and forth secondment between accountants and the Treasury, you get a picture of policymakers who are making decisions with a set of assumptions which are very different to the wider public understanding of what’s going on. And when that ends up with such big impacts on people’s lives that’s actually quite a dangerous divide. And Oxfam had argued that one of the big-gest and most worrying things about the rise of inequality isn’t just the inequality in income, it’s almost inevitably led to an inequality in terms of political decision-making. Because when you have that much money concentrated in a very small number of people they are going to have influence and it’s very difficult to see any society in history where that’s not happened. And in a sense, because one of the things that the very rich are most keen to protect is their money, tax is going to be one of the policy areas they home in on. So what we’ve seen is this world view difference between elite policy makers, and ordinary people; it’s going back to Ivana Trump’s notorious comment about the little people paying their taxes.

And therefore in an environment where a lack of money is absolutely fundamental to public debate, the effectiveness of our tax systems becomes really important. And when we’ve done opinion polls on attitudes towards tax dodging – I’ll come back to this wonderful technical phrase in a moment – the unhappiness is pretty high among voters of all main parties, but one party is significantly higher than all the rest, and that is UKIP. Which might come as a surprise to some people but it is part of this general feeling of unhappiness with the political system that their supporters most strongly feel. And I rec-ognise that some of you might wince at the phrase ‘tax dodging’, it’s a great piece of Oxfam-speak



but an appalling piece of tax professional-speak because it means absolutely nothing. But I would argue it is important at the moment, particu-larly in terms of the public understanding of the debate. Because so much of that understanding has been built on unhappiness at the tax arrange-ments of companies like Google and Amazon and Vodafone. And none of those were illegal and none of them were even in the areas of serious tax avoidance. They weren’t in the same ballpark as Take That, a great recent illustration. But they did cut across what the majority of people think is fair and reasonable and they end up being part of a tax regime that has reduced tax receipts, distorted competition particularly if you’re in a market where there are smaller local competitors who do pay their taxes, and of course reducing social assets. And we would argue for us to ignore this behaviour because it falls outside the techni-cal definitions of avoidance, is a serious mistake. And we think that’s fully recognised by wider public opinion. Now we know that this behaviour clearly falls within the rules at the moment. But we would argue that means there’s a significant problem with the rules. They can’t all be changed at UK level, because some of them will just get undercut by business competitors, but they do require global action in some cases.

And this is the final point I’ll come to: the whole nature of what an organisation like Oxfam has been doing in the tax debate and why we think Margaret Hodge and UK Uncut have made a positive contribution, and where we come to the role of tax professionals. And I can see Gareth nodding [laughter] amusedly? Angrily?

We’ll see in a moment. Because for us, we have been trying to open up a debate on an area which has not been deliberately secretive, but nearly all our tax debates have been about levels of tax because we’ve assumed, I think, for those outside the profession, that if you set a tax rate it gets collected. Now of course you all know that’s rubbish. But ask me ten years ago and I wouldn’t have known it was rubbish, five years ago I cer-tainly would have done, the last two years I’ve learned far more about tax collection than I ever thought I would. But the point is, from the point of view of an organisation trying to change the terms of public opinion and political debate, in a sense creating a level of awareness has been more important to start that debate than getting the technicalities right. Because if we’d gone straight in with the technicalities we’d have bored people stupid, lost everyone, and taken the debate nowhere.

Now I understand that can be very frustrat-ing for people on the front line dealing with people’s tax returns and seeing quite techni-cally ill-informed statements from the likes of Margaret Hodge or campaigners. Because they are technically ill-informed, but that’s not what we are trying to do to start with. We’re trying to get the issue on the agenda. But we can’t leave it like that. Because actually, if we’re going to make meaningful changes, your expertise [and that of] other people in the tax profession becomes absolutely invaluable; and we can’t make changes which increase tax receipts without getting the details right. And this is why we’ve engaged really strongly with the group that ARC have set up on


MOTIONS 31-35

Organisation & CommsBy its nature a mix of routine and controversy, this session provided some of the liveliest debate of the AGM.

MOTION 31 from Committee advocated electronic balloting as the default position except where the law requires a post-al ballot. Perhaps unsurpris-ingly, given that the motion was as much about costs as efficiency, the new Treasurer, Eugene Mitchell spoke for Committee, and mentioned the cost of postal ballots in his second sentence. But he also spoke of the tremendous efforts required of the union to ensure that data was accu-rate and the work that officers and full-timers had had to do to ensure that our statutory ballots were legal. He made a plea for members to update their details. “You’d be sur-prised at the number of mem-bers that we have who, ac-cording to some of the FDA’s records, are based in offices that closed some years ago.”

Tamsin Wallbank (South and West Wales Centre) asked for clarification on whether members could use their HMRC machines for such bal-lots, and Gareth confirmed that, for industrial action, we cannot currently ballot elec-tronically; for all other bal-lots members would be able to use their HMRC machine. Tamsin was satisfied with this, and so, apparently was the AGM, who carried the motion overwhelmingly.

MOTION 32 from Edinburgh Centre called on Commit-tee to focus on recruitment,

especially of trainees. Steve McFarlane (longstanding and returning Committee member, but speaking for his Centre) said “the greater the membership density the more legitimacy we have to go to the department and talk on behalf of our members, indeed of all the people in our grades.” No one objected to these sentiments and after a jocular intervention from Gra-ham Flew, who said he simply wanted to support a motion from Scotland, AGM carried the motion.

Leicester’s MOTION 33 called on Committee to build capability within ARC and within Committee to de-velop skills to represent ARC

members. Mike Simmonds, proposing, anticipated a Com-mittee amendment which removed one reference to Committee so that the motion sounded less like a criticism of Committee’s representation of ARC members in the past. He urged members to pass the motion unamended. “This motion is about trying to get Committee upskilled to be the best they can be, and be the best they can be for ARC. That is the beginning, the middle and the end of it… The way that you’ll know if this motion has been successful is at the end of the year if the Commit-tee members have all been trained and doing better.”

Graham Flew for Commit-

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Public Understanding of Tax and we recognise that our next steps need to be, for us as campaigners and tax professionals to start focussing on workable solutions, to engage with businesses who under-stand that this is doing a lot of damage to their long term reputation, their customer base and so on, and that we need trust in the system for it to work. And the ARC working group have done a great deal to start building those relationships and we need to keep on working with them to take those debates forward.

I believe that we’ve entered these debates not from the point of view of fundamentally different principles, but from very different perspectives and professional backgrounds. But I do believe that many of the things we’re trying to achieve, between Oxfam and ARC, actually fundamentally, ultimately are pretty similar about building a stronger tax base for a fairer society. And we will continue to talk in a loud voice, sometimes in an informed voice, but the closer we get to getting the policies right, the more we will focus on the detail and we’re very grateful for ARC’s support in actually helping us build that capacity and we believe you’ve got a very strong and important role to play in brokering that debate – not just with us but with businesses, with other tax professionals, and with government. Because while your expertise may feel quite difficult for us to understand, for many of us, it’s absolutely fun-damental not only to these debates but the wider functioning of our public services and you’ve made a really important start to this and I think it’s very important for our future stable tax collection that you continue to remain in this. Thank you very much



Good evening everyone, welcome to ARC’s 2014 dinner which sees us back in the lavish surroundings of the Grand Connaught Rooms. I hope you enjoyed the meal – let me start by asking you to join me in thanking Debbie Stamper and Graham Flew for organising today’s AGM and this evening’s dinner. Thank you Debbie and Graham.

Those of you who were at last year’s din-ner may recall that I told my eldest daugh-ter’s then favourite joke about why flamin-gos lift up one leg – because if they lifted two they’d fall flat on their bums. Sarah, don’t tell Megan that I said a rude word! Well a year on and, having recently turned five, Megan’s humour is more sophisti-cated, unlike that of Rosie who turns three at the end of the month and doesn’t quite yet get the flamingo joke. So let’s get the joke thing out of the way again by telling Megan’s current favourite: what does Dr Who eat with Pasta? Dalek bread!

Moving swiftly on. When I started the Presidency the advice I had from a few colleagues was ‘show your soft and human side, let people in’. A bit of a challenge for someone who took delight in discovering that members in Cardiff had nicknamed me ‘Red faced angry man’.

But try to show my soft and human side and try to let people in I have, usu-ally by adding bits about my family life into my blog and arcnews articles. I’ve blogged about our mice visitation, blown down fences, broken boilers, birthday parties, the life – and deaths – of our pet fish and more besides. And, although it has probably passed most of you by, I have slowly but steadily let slip some of my guilty pleasures.

Stereotypical it may be, but I guess many of you had long worked out that I’m a rugby man. I support my home side of Blaengarw, my region the Ospreys, my country Wales and one more – you’ve guessed it, anyone playing England!

Staying with the sporting theme leads me into one of my guilty pleasures – ‘the darts’. I have confessed, in arcnews, to

The 2014 ARC Dinner


being a fan of ‘the darts’ and in particular of Phil ‘The Power’ Taylor. Unfortunately Phil ‘The Power’s’ power is on the wane and he was knocked out early in this year’s world championship so did not add to his 16 world titles. But in my eyes Phil Taylor is a sporting great, right up there with my Welsh rugby heroes – Shane Williams, Ryan Jones, Bobby Windsor and Jonathan Davies.

I may be wrong but someone I can’t imagine stepping up to the oche is HMRC’s CEO Lin Homer. Lin is a well-known supporter of Ipswich Town in the round ball game – or kissball as us rugby peo-ple disparagingly, but accurately, call it. Lin, it’s great to see you here and I’m pleased that you’ve been able to stay a little longer than last year – unless you are suddenly called away to an emer-gency meeting of PAC. Two years have passed quickly and it seems like only yesterday that you and I were both starting out on new journeys in our respective roles. You are very welcome this evening and no doubt when I sit down you’ll delight in telling me about all the one hundred and eighties you’ve thrown down your local.

Unfortunately, due to unfore-seen circumstances, HMRC’s sec-ond Permanent Secretary and Tax Assurance Commissioner Edward Troup sent late apologies at being unable to attend tonight, but in his absence I’ll say a thank you and well done to Guy Hooper and the rest of his Tax Assurance and Governance team for doing such a great job at today’s AGM.

Also here from Excom are Jim Harra, Jennie Granger and Ruth Owen. Great to see each of you, I hope you’ve had an enjoyable eve-ning. A welcome also to the many other HMRC senior leaders here this evening.

The attentive among you will have noticed that I have not wel-comed any parliamentary guests. Last year, for the first time, both the minister and shadow attended, they were invited this year – honest – along with Stephen Williams MP, chair of the Lib Dem back bench treasury committee – but unfor-tunately parliamentary business means they are unable to attend.

No link to parliamentarians I assure you, but another of my guilty pleasures is the whole zombie genre. I’m not quite as fanatical about it as Committee colleague Julie Blayney, but I do love a zombie movie. I have to admit that when ARC started thinking about widening our tax campaigning work to involve exter-nal stakeholders in a bid to raise the level of public awareness on all things tax I was a bit worried that the media and public would see us as ‘The Walking Dead’. But the expert guidance of Iain Campbell and fantastic profes-sional advice from Emily Wallace and Steve Barwick from Connect Communications has ensured that our Public Understanding Group is far from ‘the undead’. Very much alive and very welcome here tonight are Iain, Emily and Steve.

It also gives me great pleasure to welcome external members of the Public Understanding Group to this evening’s dinner – Rhiannon Jones from the CBI and Mike Truman editor of Taxation. Also welcome are Anne Fairpo and Natalie Miller from the CIOT and ATT respectively. I can confirm that none of them are flesh eaters and that we had no special dietary requests for human brains, so you can all rest easy. Thank you to each of our professional colleagues for attending.

The next group to welcome to this evening’s dinner – and defi-nitely no link to zombies here as it’s a group I’m about to join – are the union’s past presidents. With us tonight are Graham Black, Frances Pickering, Jim Ferguson, Terry Cook, Michelle Wyer, Jeff Brice and Stephen Bibby. I’m delighted that you are here with us this eve-ning and it is particularly pleasing to see my old friend Stephen back in the fold of his union family.

Other old friends to welcome as returning guests tonight include two recently retired stalwarts of ARC and HMRC respectively – Martin Fletcher and Anthony Inglese. Add in Terry Cook and there’s a retirement boy band in the making. I leave it to you to decide which of those provides the glamour, who’s the best singer and who’s the dancer. But I reckon,

The 2014 ARC Dinner



and we may find out later, that Anthony’s a real groovster with a thang for electro funk.

One thing I haven’t divulged too widely is that I have a number of tattoos – five in all and each meaningful to me. On my inner forearms – in case I forget them – the names of my daughters, Rosie and Megan. The top of my left arm bears a red dragon, my right has the Chinese symbol for music and on my right shoulder is my first and oldest tattoo – a red star – erm, something to do with my political back-ground but again let’s move quickly on!

Now this is news to my long suffering wife, but I’m thinking of having at least three more tattoos – ARC, FDA, and ‘the noble purpose’. Actually, given how often we’ve changed our name in recent years perhaps having an ARC tattoo isn’t such a good idea – and anyway I only have two buttocks!

Ahem. It is my pleasure to welcome guests from ARC’s sister unions. From FDA we are joined by General Secretary Dave Penman and his partner Kay Hender, FDA President Sue Gethin and FDA Assistant General Secretaries Rob O’Neill and Naomi Cooke. I am pleased to wel-come ARC Secretary and FDA Officer Wynne Parry and his wife Debra. We are also joined this evening by Lynda Priestley, Margi Rathbone and Helen McFarlane from PCS and by Ciaran Rohan, Paul Monks and Val Jeffery from our Irish sister union AHCPS. Comrades, you are all very welcome guests this evening.

It’s difficult to single out anyone who’s served on Committee over the past two years but I want to give special thanks to a few starting with my Bristol comrade in arms, John McDonough who, along with his lovely wife Ruth, retires from HMRC later this month. I first met John in the mid-nineties when I joined the union and became active in Bristol centre. John was Treasurer when I was President of the cen-tre, a role he held until just a few months ago and, as is the way of things, we have grown old together in ARC Bristol. John, Ruth I’m delighted that you are both with us tonight and I wish you both a long, happy and healthy retirement.

Next I want to mention Debbie Stamper who is moving on from the job she’s had as the President’s assistant for the past few years to return to a role in HMRC. Debbie has given me fantastic support and been a joy to work with. As my wife will attest, anyone who has to put up with me deserves a medal, Debbie has certainly earned hers. Debbie I’m going to miss you.


Finally my two always reliable pillars of advice – Tony Wallace and Wynne Parry. Wynne is a fellow Welshman, a fellow rugby nut and a fellow short man and now my good friend. Wynne and I texted each other throughout Wales’s games in this year’s six nations – the worse the Welsh performance, the more profane the texts became! Wynne we have next year’s 6 nations and the proper world cup to look forward to and I’ll be texting you through-out both of those.

I couldn’t have asked for a better Deputy than my pal Tony. He’s been a loyal, constructive and supportive ally, and he will be a great President keeping alive the recent requirement that ARC Presidents be Celtic – that’s with a hard ‘C’ as opposed to the soft one at the start of Tony’s beloved Celtic. Tony, long may our bromance continue. Tony and Wynne, my heartfelt thanks and best wishes for the future. I am determined that our friendship will endure.

Earlier I mentioned the work of our Public Understanding Group. The major success of that work so far was last year’s Closing the Tax Gap parliamentary event hosted by ARC in conjunction with Taxation magazine, ACCA and ICAEW. The success of that event was in no small part down to the expert chairing of tonight’s guest speaker Vanessa Houlder, Tax Correspondent at the Financial Times. Vanessa, thank you for agreeing to speak this evening and welcome to ARC’s annu-al dinner.

My biggest thank you goes to my wife, Sarah. For the past two years Sarah has held the fort at home in Bristol while I’ve been gallivanting around the coun-try when not spending time in London. Sarah, I’m sure there have been times when you’ve felt like a single mother and it just may be that despite what you say publicly on Facebook you’re actually dreading having me back to disrupt family life. You’ve been my rock and I couldn’t have done this without you. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to thank you enough, but I love you and the girls with all my heart and am looking forward to many, many enjoyable family times together. Hills Family Pyjama Party Saturday Takeaway Nights – as we’ve so catchily called them – are to become the stuff of legend. Right, really, how much more of my soft and human side can I show?!

Finally, thank you to all of you for your support; it’s been my pleasure and privi-lege to have served as ARC President. Please now join me and raise your glasses in a toast to our guests



It’s great to be here, and to talk to you about the work that we’re doing at the TUC looking at the state of the UK economy, and where we think things are going in the future. I think what I’m planning to do is talk a little about

where the TUC thinks our economic prospects are heading, which I hope will be of interest; a bit about what the implications of those trends are for public spending and services, both now and into the next election, and also say a bit about the very important role the TUC thinks HMRC has to play, both in getting our public spending back into balance and in continuing to deliver against those public service goals that are still important for our economy. And also a bit about the case that we’re making for the sorts of realistic alternative choices that there might be and I’ll talk a little bit about some of our particular work on tax, which I’ve been told might be of some interest to some people in the room.

So first off, the good news is that the econo-my’s growing; probably no one’s missed this – it’s all over the press all the time now. There have been some revisions to the figures that show that while at the time ONS were reporting that we had a big double dip recession during 2011 and 2012, actually there was pretty weak growth then. But you can see that what’s happened is we had in 2008 a massive global recession, some sort of recovery, a long period of stagnation, and finally in the last few months things have started to pick up again to the point where we’re nearly back to the point we were in 2008; probably I think the next quarter GDP data in the middle of 2014 will show that the economy’s finally recovered the ground that it had lost since 2008 – that’s not exactly a huge success story. It’s taken six years to get to that point; if the economy continued to grow at trend from the 2008 peak, we would be a very much larger economy and a very much more pros-perous country if we’d managed to make up some of that ground more quickly. This chart shows you the recessions of the last hundred years and the

starting point is when all the recessions started and you can see all those lines getting up to the middle of the chart relatively quickly compared to the big black line at the bottom which is the prog-ress of our current recovery from recession. The key point to take from this is that with even the 1920s recession, the economy had recovered to the size that it was at the start of recession much more quickly than has been the case this time around. You can see we’re on track to be more than 72 months following the start of the reces-sion and we still haven’t even got back to the size we were to start with. Thank goodness it’s finally here but it has taken a very long time and as we’ll see, that’s had implications for public spending as well as for the lives of the millions of people whose wages have been frozen and who’ve found themselves out of work.

This chart looks at what’s happening across different sectors of the economy: the key thing is that services, which includes financial services, has already surpassed its 2008 position; construc-tion, manufacturing, production – they’ve still got a very long way to go until they get back to where they were. So, you know, the sort of rebalanced idea that we’re going to have some sort of manu-facturing renaissance and the financial sector was going to start to play a much smaller role, as yet

Keynote Address: Nicola Smith Head of Economic and Social Affairs, TUC

“The key point to take from this is that with even the 1920s recession, the economy had recovered to the size that it was at the start of recession much more quickly than has been the case this time around.”


tee proposed the amendment. “What we want, what we re-ally really want, is to build ca-pability in all of ARC and that includes Committee. So I’m not suggesting that we don’t need developing at the centre, I’m not suggesting we’re not failing in our responsibility of developing all including ourselves.” AGM agreed and the amendment was passed. The amended motion was then passed without further debate.

MOTION 34 from Manches-ter gave rise to rather more debate. The motion called on Committee to improve its communication, and accused Committee of listening to alternative views only after

resistance. Alan Dickenson proposed for Manchester, and drew on the PMR system. “This isn’t a motion about communication overload, which we all suffer from, but it’s about effective two-way communication between Committee and members. Well, I’m very sorry Com-mittee but I’ve got a difficult message to deliver: your end of year marking is must im-prove.” He spoke of learning that he was going on strike from the Guardian, and con-cluded “while the motion may on the face of it appear critical it’s just improvement needed, talk to us listen to our views and we can all live happily ever after.”

Steve McFarlane opposed the motion on behalf of Com-mittee. “There is one very simple reason for that, and it is the statement in the mo-tion which says that members still feel that their views have only been listened to after significant resistance. Com-mittee rejects that accusation. Committee is quite clear that one of its main purposes is to listen to and reflect the

views of members.” Vicky Johnson for West Midlands Centre supported the motion. “As members and as Com-mittee we need to listen to each other, we need to allow people to disagree with our views, we need to respect that people have different views and we shouldn’t be defen-sive, because if we carry on being defensive – and that’s members and Committee – we’ll get nowhere and we’ll

end up a very split union.” Liz Robertson (Liverpool Centre) also supported the motion. She said she had only got up to speak because Commit-tee had “asked you to not to support the motion because they object to this statement that members feel that their views have only been listened to after significant resistance. By pinning the ‘please don’t support it’ on that, you’re doing it again. I’m sorry Steve [McFarlane], but members do feel that.”

Will Richardson (Committee) opposed the motion, describ-ing it as “excessively unfair”, and declared that he had been in the minority on Committee over the management ‘offer’ on PMR and Terms and Con-ditions, which members had rejected. “It’s the job of a mem-ber-led organisation to follow the views of its members and it would be very surprising in-

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hasn’t emerged. There’s also lots of evidence to show that if

you look at the role that investment’s playing in our recovery, we’re fifty billion pounds off where the OBR thought we would be in 2010 with respect to the extent to which investment is driv-ing growth as opposed to spending. And when we look at what has been driving the recovery, a real concern for us at the TUC is that a lot of it has been consumer spending, and there’s quite a lot of evidence that that’s been funded by people borrowing against rising house prices rather than by incomes going up or by people and companies investing in new plants, new facilities and more capacity. So big concerns that while we’re see-ing a recovery now, we don’t know how strong it’s going to be over the next few years, we don’t know how it’s going to last, and there isn’t really much evidence that we’ve changed our economic model substantially from where we were before the crash. Which raises some concerns about what may happen in ten or 15 years when the same sort of bubbles that had developed pre-2008 may just replicate themselves again.

This chart shows what’s happening to pay and I know that is a real concern across the public sector at the moment, and it’s a real concern across the economy, because real earnings have



been negative for about four years now. So the value of the money that people have to spend has been going down year after year. Now you might have read some stuff in the papers saying the cost of living squeeze is now over but what we’ve seen is that, using CPI inflation, which excludes hous-ing costs, there was a 0.1 percent increase in aver-age weekly earnings – so it’s essentially a sort of stagnation rather than a significant improvement; when you look at what was happening against RPI, a measure that does include housing costs, the picture doesn’t look so positive and today the latest labour market data are out and we haven’t seen any substantial increases in the rate of nominal pay growth. What’s driving those trends is really quite complicated and it’s quite concern-ing because that measure is a composite of what’s happening to you in the public sector, where people are seeing pay freezes and no increases in their pay settlements, it reflects the fact that many people want to work full-time but can only get part-time hours, so inevitably their earnings are being held down, it reflects the fact that we are seeing increases in self employment where we know that pay is far lower than in permanent jobs – in fact over the last year we found out that half the jobs that have been created in the economy are self employed rather than employee positions. So there’s a range of factors that are driving this trend in real earnings. The fact is that despite the fact the economy has picked up and GDP has increased, there isn’t really any evidence yet of that feeding into the amount of money people have in their pocket and certainly in the public sector, the picture will be worse than this over the period to come because there isn’t any indication, given what we know about inflation forecasts and given what we know about the chancellor and this current government’s position on public sector pay, for real earnings to go positive in our view.

We have had some welcome falls in unemploy-ment in recent years – down to 6.9 percent today.

That is a very impressive rate at which unem-ployment is falling and is very positive for those people who would have found themselves out of work had that rate not been falling so quickly. But underemployment, the experience of people who are working part time or working shorter hours and want more hours, is at a historic high and that means that there are lots of people who’ve remained in work in the recession who might not have been in work in the eighties or nineties, but who don’t have enough work. So the sort of job story of the last five or six years has been that, yes, we have more people in jobs, but the qual-ity and the pay and the conditions and the hours in those jobs have been progressively eroded and we haven’t yet seen a substantial pick up in those indicators, which are what we think is needed to indicate a real recovery that makes a difference for people at work. When you look at all these claims that you hear at the moment about the number of people in work being at a historic high, that is correct: the level is at a historic high. But when you look at what’s driving that level we’ve got a far bigger share now of self employed work, of part time work and again that category at the end – people who are involuntarily in part-time work.

And my final chart on broader labour market trends shows that over the last six years they haven’t hit everybody in the same way. There are some people, young people in particular and people with no qualifications, who’ve seen their chances of being in employment really plummet to the point where they are now very disadvan-taged relative to the rest of the population. There is some good news: people with disabilities, people from ethnic minority groups, in previ-ous recessions – those groups have seen their employment chances deteriorate significantly; that hasn’t happened so much this time round, maybe because the jobs numbers held up. But we have seen life for some people get much worse.

“What’s happening to public sector employment? The position is pretty stark. Public sector employment is due to fall 21% between 2010 and the end of the financial year 2018-19 – the largest recorded cut in public sector employment over the last fifty years.”


deed in a democratic organisa-tion if Committee always took decisions and always made recommendations which go down with the majority of the members.”

Tony Wallace (Committee) also opposed the motion. He accepted that the majority on Committee had been wrong, although pointing out that it was by eight votes out of the entire membership. He also described the efforts he and others had then made to ensure that the vote of the membership was translated into effective action, speaking to various Centres around the country in an effort to deliver a mandate for industrial ac-tion.

When Graham Black, for-mer President, came to the podium there was some ten-sion and members wondered which way he would speak. Graham supported the mo-tion, not out of any criticism of Committee, but because it represented the feeling of some members that commu-nication could be improved. So he supported the motion “with some degree of reluc-tance I have to say, it is not me talking about criticising what’s happening, it’s about trying to learn lessons and try and improve the way we go on so I agree to support the motion.” Perhaps in a sign of the way the AGM was lean-ing, this speech from a former President drew loud applause.

Tim Lintott, (Brighton Cen-

tre) declaring himself as part of the eight majority which had rejected the Committee recommendation on the offer, spoke against the motion. “ Martin Fletcher…came down, he spent lots of time, he took lots of effort to listen to local activists, we told him why we were generally voting no, and I think he learned an awful lot from that. I think there is genuine effort to listen and I think that has definitely im-proved in the last year.”

Iain Cameron (Edinburgh Centre) said he thought this was the most interesting mo-tion of the day. “I don’t really care much which way you vote on this, but I think the underlying question about where we’re going and the need to discuss it, is a really really important one.”

Alan Dickenson, exercising his right of reply on behalf of Manchester, said he didn’t think the motion was contro-versial, “because what we’re actually instructing Commit-tee is to improve its efforts at meaningful engagement with, and listening to, the wider membership. I can’t see how that is controversial. Surely Committee must always want to do that?”

As many had already guessed from the balance of the debate, the motion was then carried.

The session concluded with less controversy, as Eugene Mitchell moved MOTION 35, replacing the current rules with the new draft, bringing the rules into the 21st centu-ry. He paid tribute to the work Jeremy Burrows had done, not only while on Committee, but also in finalising the redrafted rules even after pressure of work had obliged him to leave Committee. The AGM, trusting to the judgement of Eugene and Jeremy, and perhaps tired after the heated debate over motion 34, passed the motion without debate.

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OK. so what’s happening to public sec-tor employment? The position is pretty stark. According to the OBR, public sector employment is due to fall 21 per cent between 2010 and the end of the financial year 2018-19. That would be the largest recorded cut in public sector employ-ment over the last fifty years, three times larger than the reductions that were put in place in the nineties. And while it is right that at the moment the private sector is creating jobs at a faster rate than public sector employment is falling, it is also right that the quality in the pay and condi-tions of those jobs are often far worse than the public sector jobs that they are replacing, and that there is a regional disparity between where those jobs are being created. I had a look at the latest stats before I came out, unemployment in the north east today is 10.1 per cent, in the south of England it’s 5 per cent.

And I also had a look at the latest civil service stats, and again it is a tough picture as you will all very well know in this room, with total employ-ment down 15 percent on 2010 as well as sub-stantial pay restraint. I think this illustrates the sort of scale of this retrenchment, illustrates the sort of vital role that unions and that your union is continuing to play in this. We know that unions have managed to protect some core terms and conditions for staff, and we know that there have also been examples where unions have managed to identify wider cost savings that have managed to be delivered without substantial detrimental impacts on the workforce. And an interesting thing is that if you look across local authorities and you look at where there have been successful union negotiations and where there have not, you often see a very different picture in terms of what the impact on pay and conditions and jobs has been for people in those areas. So although it is an incredibly tough time, I think it’s also, certainly for us at the TUC, illustrates what an important time it is for unions in working to mitigate some of these impacts and also to try and offset some of the very bad practice arising across the public sector, when people feel under incredible pres-sure to make savings and existing terms and con-ditions and basic employment rights are thrown up in the air.

So, what are the likely future prospects? Well the next graph shows what happened to the pub-lic finances during the crash. The basic point to take from this is that an enormous deficit opened up during the recession. What happened is tax receipts went down, public spending went up as more people lost their jobs, and as a country we were spending a lot more money than the exche-quer was getting in. What’s happened since? Despite all the rhetoric, the chancellor will still be borrowing about sixty billion more by the end of this parliament than he planned to, and why is



that? It’s because the rate at which the deficit has been closing has tailed off during the period of poor growth, and because the tax revenues as the economy has picked up have been weaker than expected and that’s because the labour market recovery has been poorer: when you have more people in part time work, in short hours work, in low paid work, they pay less tax. And it’s also because of some discretionary choices that the government’s made with respect to corporation tax and personal tax allowances which have been quite substantial giveaways in the face of very dif-ficult spending conditions. At the TUC, we are optimistic that a substantial proportion of that gap can be shut by a strong and growing economy get-ting more people into work and generating more revenues but we will have to see, as the recovery develops and as government policy influences the type of recovery we get, the extent to which that is borne out.

This chart from the IFS shows the timing and the composition of what the current government has planned, and there are some very concern-ing trends, I think. Firstly you can see that tax increases are only a very small part of the gov-ernment’s planned fiscal consolidation – they’re sticking to an 80:20 ratio. We don’t think there’s any particular logic for that ratio – even during the nineties the Tories followed a 60:40 ratio, with a far larger role for tax to play. The other big issue is current spending, which is effectively on public services: a large part of that consolidation has been pushed back till after the election. The IFS said in their green budget this year that only 36% of the cuts to the spending that funds public services, has been enacted so far and that there will still be a significant proportion to come after the next election. By the end of this financial year only 40% of the planned spending cuts overall to 2018-19 are in place. That’s not really the end of the story because the IFS have also said this isn’t deliverable, this sort of retrenchment will be beyond what has ever been imagined or delivered in political or economic history across the world, but you know that is the scale of the plans as set out by the current government.

But what choices do the government really have? It’s really important to remember that even in tough times, governments are still taking deci-sions. There are decisions that governments can make about the speed at which they need to close that gap that’s opened up; if it’s heading in the

right direction there’s no iron rule of economics that says you have to shut it all within three years, which is the current government’s plan after the next election. There are also big choices on the balance between tax and spending: does it have to be 80% spending cuts and 20% tax rises or can you have different ratios? Looking across the world we know you can have a different balance. And within this context, governments are still making tax and spending choices all the time. I’ve set out here what we know about the plans of dif-ferent parties. You can see that the Conservative position is that they are aiming for an overall budget surplus by 2018-19 and 80% of that is still to be achieved through cuts in spending with very substantial cuts in spending on public services. The Lib Dems are sticking to the same fiscal tar-get but saying that they would like to see 25% of the consolidation come from tax increases; so still 75% from spending cuts. And Labour plans tar-geting a budget surplus excluding capital so that leaves some leeway for a Labour government to say that it was going to spend more or not reach a surplus on whatever is categorised as the capital budget, a slightly longer time period for getting back into surplus and no specified information yet on exactly what they think the role would be for tax in the consolidation. So these are all still very tight public spending settlements but at the same time there is some flexibility and difference between the parties.

My last few points I wanted to make on tax. Some of those choices the TUC disagrees with very strongly: corporation tax cut from 28% to 20% will cost us £7.8 billion a year by 2016-17. Again, personal allowance changes: we’re not against reducing taxation for those on the lowest incomes but that tax change doesn’t really help those on the very lowest pay and is incredibly expensive: £10.75 billion a year. If you add up those two changes alone you get rid of the need for any further benefit cuts over the next parlia-ment, just to give you an example of the scale of what that money would pay for. As an illustra-tion of that point about the role of the personal allowance: if you’re earning under the personal allowance, increasing it further doesn’t bring you any gain at all – and that’s most women on the minimum wage, the majority of whom work part time. But because the higher-rate thresholds were adjusted so that people in the 40% tax band would benefit from the latest personal allowance


MOTIONS 36-39

TOIL, Terms & Conditions Blood, sweat and tears to follow.

Time off in lieu (TOIL) is a thorny issue in HMRC, and two motions (in common de-bate) on the subject kicked off this session. Leicester Centre’s MOTION 36 called for hour-for-hour toil and no pres-sure on members who wish to work their conditioned

hours. Ashley Falla, moving for Leicester, sought audience sympathy with “Ashley Falla Leicester Centre making my first appearance at Confer-ence” and followed up with a straightforward explanation of the purpose of the motion: working extra hours is not an issue for most members, but being refused the time off later is. Manchester, in

the person of Jonathan Ad-croft, then moved MOTION 37, which focused on the inconsistency across the de-partment in the attitude to hour-for-hour TOIL, with some businesses happy to grant it and others refusing, or insist-ing on a minimum number of additional weekly hours

before considering TOIL. He listed various approaches in Manchester. “Some people have got hour-for-hour; some people don’t get any at all, it’s just expected they’ll work the hours for the job and that’s that; others are allowed 75% of all excess hours as TOIL; and some, in a rather odd circumstance, can have TOIL if the excess hours relate to work-related travel but not if it relates to working extra hours in the office.” Jonathan went on to quote results from the recent FDA survey on ex-cess hours “72.9% of people who responded believed that working excessive hours is a problem in HMRC and 71.9% don’t think the department is doing enough to address the

problem.” Steve Dodd (Leeds Centre) got up to point out that the reasons why people work excess hours are also important. “This is about TOIL and it’s right that we should try and find out what’s going on and impose consist-ency but as well as regulating TOIL we’ve got to get to the causes of it as well.” He called for Committee to seek from HMRC a full audit of excess hours and their causes.

Steve was followed by Mick Lett, who announced that this was his last AGM as a Com-mittee member, although probably not his last AGM. He urged members not to give their time to an employer that doesn’t care. “Have you signed an opt-out? If not the department’s acting illegally. Grass them up to the EU. [Laughter] You work to live, you don’t live to work. This is not a rehearsal and you’re a long time dead.” Mick’s sec-ond mention of death drew a cheer from the AGM.

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rise, someone on £99,000 does gain from that change, raising questions about how progressive that change actually is. When you do the calcula-tion you find that some people have lost literally thousands of pounds a year because of the way that those cuts have been targeted. Actually, a piece of work that the TUC will be launching quite shortly shows that although you hear this rhetoric about benefit cuts and hitting those out of work, about 70% of cuts have hit those who are in low paid jobs and are working.

We think there is a wider role for fair taxation and clearly a really important role for HMRC in collecting all the tax that’s still being avoided and is due. We have argued strongly that investing more in [HMRC] at a time of such significant pressure on the public finances would be a very sensible and efficient use of public money, and we’ve also argued that people in HMRC need to have the tools to do their job. We pushed quite strongly on the government’s General Anti Avoidance Rule which we think is not fit for pur-pose and has scope to be significantly strength-ened. I also wanted to say a bit about the really important role we think HMRC is doing in get-ting money back for minimum wage workers who are not being properly paid. We’ve had a look at the budget for that part of HMRC, and we found that the enforcement budget has been effectively frozen for five years and has fallen in real terms. We’ve also been arguing against those who believe in devolving those powers to local authorities. The most effective thing to do would be to strengthen the resource at the centre rather than diffusing what’s already a poorly resourced service out to a local area.

I just wanted to end with a few slightly more optimistic slides because I’m aware it’s a pretty demoralising and depressing picture at the moment. The TUC have been doing some polling on public attitudes on public spending and we have found good news: people are not in favour of the current government’s plans for a permanently

“While we’re seeing a recovery now, we don’t know how strong it’s going to be, we don’t know how long it’s going to last, and there isn’t much evidence that we’ve changed our economic model from before the crash.”




Allan Lyons from West Mid-lands Centre closed the de-bate with what he described as a cynical point, which was that in seeking consistency we might be met by an HMRC attempt to reduce all TOIL to the lowest common denomi-nator, adding that the best way of achieving hour-for-hour TOIL was to work part-time as he currently does.

Both motions, when put to the vote, passed overwhelm-ingly.

Two motions on terms and conditions followed. MOTION 38 from London BCD Centre noted that our conditions are now supposed to reflect those of a good modern employer, before condemning the situ-ation in which people being promoted move to worse terms. Peter Horne almost moved the motion formally, saying that as it spoke for it-self he had nothing further to

say. Marie Hardy, a Commit-tee member for a further few hours, supported the motion, saying that she thought there were equality implications in the loss of terms and condi-tions on promotion, and it was short-sighted of HMRC to say that promotion was mere-ly a voluntary matter. “Many members put their careers

on hold for various reasons, either caring responsibilities, ill health, any other combina-tion of factors personal fac-tors, and I think you can rec-ognise that, if I can put it this way, the longer it takes you, the longer it takes you.” Mo-tion 38 was then carried.

MOTION 39 from Manches-ter attacked the idea that our terms and conditions are not always written down in black and white, and called on Com-mittee to secure a compre-

hensive written contract. Nick Holland, proposing, said that the motion arose from frustra-tion at being ‘shafted’ over terms and conditions “espe-cially over the last couple of years every time there’s been a shift it’s been in the employ-er’s favour and when we try and address that we find that there’s no contractual entitle-ment, there’s nothing really written down, there’s just the shifting sands of the guide that seems to be rewritten whenever it suits HMRC. So with this motion what we’re really asking Committee to do is to try and get HMRC to set down in writing what we actu-ally have now.”

He was opposed by Linda Ridgers-Waite (London Eus-ton Centre), who pointed out

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smaller state and do recognise the role that public spending and public services play in delivering and strengthening our economy and delivering for households. If you look across the parties, you find that it is not a majority across the public who want public services to be permanently cut and even amongst Conservative voters a substantial propor-tion don’t want the cuts to be permanent. That is an important message and it’s one that we are going to be building on in the months to come.

There’s also a very low proportion of people who think that as growth returns it’s going to be fairly shared; that means there’s a very strong opportu-nity for those who want fair taxation and policies that will deliver a fair economy. Also, if you look at whether people believe that there should be a basic safety net in place, there is still strong public support for the existence of that safety net. There is scope to win people over to policies which seek to help those on lower incomes and provide a safety net that’s there for everybody, rather than resounding support for very draconian cuts in tax credits and benefits that we sometimes see at the moment. And just to reiterate that point, we did a bit of polling on whether people supported the one percent uprating cap for tax credits in particular, and we found that the majority of people said this is a good policy – it’s taking money away from these lazy benefit claimants. When they found that what we were talking about was tax credits, the support for that policy fell substantially and I think one of the most interesting things was how much it fell among Conservative voters who, you know, felt very strongly that there should be support for people on low incomes in work and that that was an appropri-ate way to be spending their money.

The final slide is a bit more demoralising. Most people don’t feel like they’re gaining from the eco-nomic recovery so far. I would like to think that this means there is potential for us at the TUC to argue that there is scope for a fairer alternative where we have the gains of growth being more fairly shared, a safety net that is there to protect people, public ser-vice cuts which are not permanent and an economy which recognises the vital role that public service plays in our economy, and a much fairer tax system where the tax that is due is collected, and those who can well afford to pay are paying a much fairer share towards the welfare state and the public ser-vices that everyone relies on.

So let’s hope we can make a positive argument in the months ahead. No doubt, there are very tough times to come, but the TUC will be doing everything we can to make the case for a progres-sive and stronger economic alternative. Thanks very much

This is an edited version of Nicola Smith’s presenta-tion to the AGM. The full version will appear in the transcript of the AGM later this year.



I think Gareth’s thought was to have a bit of tax professionalism within your conference and, for your sins, you’ve got me talking about tax governance. One or two links with the previous speaker, one of the names that he

mentioned will feature in one of the slides I’ve got.

Why do you need to know all about this? You need to know about this because you may be involved in cases that need to go through gover-nance: both the big governance of Commissioners and the boards that I’m going to talk about, the changes that are being brought in, but also, if you like, the smaller governance that applies whenever we resolve disputes – management checks, that sort of thing. What I’m going to cover is an outline of the changes that Lin Homer was instrumental in bringing in, an overview of case and issues governance, and I looked at where you were put-ting your marks on Laura’s market stall outside. One or two of those questions weren’t answered quite right, so I’ll explain where – sorry – some of you went wrong on that. I’ll talk about Edward’s annual report, and I think then the review of settled cases. And a few key points for you to take away at the end.

So what is assurance? What’s it all about? Really this is all about Edward Troup being in the position as Tax Assurance Commissioner to give assurance, to give confidence, that as a depart-ment, we’re getting the right tax in, under the law. An important point, thinking about the previous speaker; we may not personally like the interna-tional rules, or the results of some of the rules around transfer pricing and that sort of thing, but what we as a department are tasked with, is

getting the right tax in, under the current law. And disputes – we’re always going to have disputes with taxpayers, and they need to be resolved and, as I’m sure most of you know, they’re resolved in a consistent way, with the Litigation and Settlement Strategy. Now I could talk at length on that, and in fact I’m going to a conference tomorrow, talk-ing about the Litigation and Settlement Strategy, which is a key part of all of this. But that final bullet up there, Edward Troup instilling confi-dence in our staff. Staff is very deliberately put first there, and that’s because unless we all have confidence in how our department is resolving disputes, particularly with the biggest taxpayers, then, in a sense, everything’s lost. How can we convince other taxpayers, Parliament, Margaret Hodge, if we ourselves are not absolutely con-vinced that we are getting the right outcomes, particularly in the largest disputes?

So a bit of history, going back, there it is, UK

GARETH HILLS: Guy Hooper took up his current role, having previously led profes-sionalism and tax assurance, in January 2013. Guy started in 1989, about the same time as me; we even went on one of those PF weeks together. He worked in Holland Park and was then promoted to Grade 7 and moved to the Large Groups office. Guy’s current role involves making sure that HMRC’s governance arrange-ments for resolving tax disputes work well, and allows tax professionals – all of us – to use our skills to resolve disputes. Guy oversees the pub-lication of Edward Troup’s annual tax assur-ance report, which reports on how that works, and in his current role he sits on a number of governance boards, and draws on his tax profes-sionalism as he and fellow board members take decisions and make recommendations on some of HMRC’s largest and most sensitive cases.

Keynote Address: Guy Hooper Deputy Director Tax Assurance, HMRC


Uncut. I wasn’t in this job when most of those head-lines were around. It was 2011 when the National Audit Office, Public Accounts Committee, Andrew Park, the judge who looked at five of our largest cases – you know, that’s when there was a lot in the press about sweetheart deals. Led to Andrew Park looking at five of our largest cases. When he looked at those, he found that we got good reasonable outcomes in all of them – and more than reasonable in some of those cases. But nevertheless we had those headlines. And slightly more recently the UK Uncut court case, the JR, where in a sense we won the court case, but we still didn’t sort of win, if you like, in the court of public opinion, with the headlines we got there: Judge tells UK Uncut the deal was not a glorious episode in the history of the Revenue. And I as a tax profes-sional, not at that time that close to the governance, and actually settling cases, I felt pretty uncomfortable when I read those headlines. I know many people in the department did.

that members were already on various terms and condi-tions depending on when they joined and which former department they came from, there was no uniform set of conditions, written or unwrit-ten. “It’ll be a bureaucratic nightmare to try and do a separate manual, in fact have all the guidance on the About You page, hundreds of pages, and we have thousands of pages of archived guidance as well. I think the most prag-matic and tactical way to deal with proposed changes to terms and conditions is sim-ply to look at the proposed change, look at the current guidance, look at the old guid-ance, and then go off and see the solicitors. Because often, whether it’s a contractual matter or not, it’s a legal opin-ion and it’s nothing to do with a manual. So can we save some time and please turn down this motion while fully agreeing that we need to do something about the attack by the employer on our terms and conditions.”

Iain Campbell, for Commit-tee, took a similar line. Out current sets of terms and conditions on the creation of HMRC “took a team of ne-gotiators years to agree, and we don’t have that facilities time any more. I think the risk would be if we tried to do this we’d eat up that valuable facilities time in discussing possibly theoretical condi-tions, theoretical problems which may never happen, at the expense of actually deal-ing with the real challenges and the real attacks that are going to take place. So like Linda I’d ask you to oppose the motion.”

Graham Black from Glasgow Centre began by saying that when he had chaired AGMs he had put his head in his hands when people proposed remission, before revealing, to AGM laughter, that this was his intention now. “What the motion is really saying is that wherever possible we

ought to be pinning them down with absolutely legally binding agreements as we go forward, without necessarily putting a whole programme in place of perhaps going back and looking at every-thing we’ve currently got, it’s saying we’re not in that world any more.” Without losing the sentiment of the motion, he wanted it remitted so that Committee could address that sentiment without being tied to the letter of the motion (I paraphrase).

Gareth called for speakers on remission, whereupon Nick Holland for Manchester said that he didn’t really ob-ject to remission, and on the vote remission was carried.

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“So what is assurance? What’s it all about? Really this is all about Edward Troup being in the position as Tax Assurance Commissioner to give assur-ance, to give confidence, that as a department, we’re getting the right tax in, under the law.”



So we needed to make these changes. Crucially, the five cases Andrew Park looked at, he did criticise us for not following the gov-ernance processes we had then, in all of those cases. In particular, he criticised the fact that [in] negotiating and authorising settlements, there wasn’t always an appropriate separation there.

So what were the changes? Our assurance of tax disputes, the February 2012 changes. The bigger one was the announcement of a Tax Assurance Commissioner. Crucially, Edward has no direct contact with taxpayers to discuss their tax affairs, and he does not immediately manage case workers, and the specialists who deal with the taxpayers. We have the new decision mak-ing model, with the Commissioners at the top, if you like. Some of that governance process was very much based on the High Risk Corporate Programme, which we had, and of course there has always been governance for smaller cases, so it’s not as if the different parts of the department were particularly running riot, doing deals all the time, absolutely not, but the perception outside, and from what Andrew Park found, was that we were seemingly not following the governance pro-cesses we then had in place.

Part of what Lin wanted to do was to make things much more transparent, so the code of gov-ernance for resolving tax disputes was published in November 2012, and that was slightly tweaked in November last year. And that code of gover-nance is a key part of us being as transparent as we can be, both for the largest tax payers, and the processes we put in place throughout the depart-ment, that puts Edward in that position where he can be confident that we’re getting the right out-comes in our disputes. Edward’s annual report is again a key part in the transparency, and then the review programme for processes in settled cases, which I’ll come onto, which is another way of making sure we’re doing the right thing.

The basic thing is now, in our cases where there’s a hundred million pounds or more of tax under consideration, or it’s a particularly sensi-tive issue, then it’s the Commissioners, three Commissioners, who take the HMRC decision, and this is a crucial point, it’s the proposal from the taxpayer, or the taxpayer’s position. The tax-payer’s proposal to resolve the dispute, if you like, and in simplistic terms, it will be a no brainer for the Commissioners to accept if [it] is exactly what we think we’d get if we were to litigate. The whole principle of how we resolve disputes is through collaboration where possible, ideally not litigating, but that’s on the assumption that we are going to get out of the way we resolve the dispute what we would get if we were to litigate – key principle there. And the three Commissioners taking the decision – Edward chairs, Jim Harra often usu-ally sits there, Nick Lodge, Jennie Grainger, Ruth Owen, and Simon Bowles, they’ve all sat – they take the decisions, and a sort of key – safety valve is the wrong word, but – a key sort of defence, if you like, to any criticism that the department might be doing inappropriate deals, is that when the Commissioners take a decision on whether or not to accept a proposal, all three have to agree. Edward doesn’t have a casting vote or anything like that, if all three don’t agree that the proposal gets in the right tax for the country, and is right under the litigation and settlement strategy, if they don’t agree, then it’s pushed back. You know, goes back to the case team, perhaps to do further work, or ultimately to litigate, if we feel we can’t accept the proposal, and that’s a pretty key point.

And at that meeting, it’s not three Commis-sioners meeting in secret, the case team is there, the specialists are there. And that’s the same with all the boards. The tax dispute resolution board, which sits below the Commissioners, puts recom-mendations up to the Commissioners on the cases the Commissioners look at – and the lower level

“We’ve always had gov-ernance, they’ve always used their professionalism as well as they can. But the department has been under incredible scrutiny, and there still is occa-sional pressure from the outside that actually, we shouldn’t be policing our-selves.”


boards in the lines of business – the case teams are there, they can see the decisions being taken, they can understand why they’re being taken.

So the tax disputes resolution board effec-tively looks at the cases that are on the way to the Commissioners, now chaired by Sue Walton, was chaired by Melissa Tatton, basically a director-level board bringing together specialists, and a key fea-ture of this high level governance is that it’s not one line of business, it’s not just the operational part of HRMC responsible for that taxpayer who’s tak-ing the decision, it ultimately brings in everyone from across to department, legal people, specialists, operational people, and so on. And the tax dispute resolution board, they put the recommendations to the Commissioners, and the Commissioners take their decision. One of the things a few people got a little bit wrong outside on putting those checkmarks on Laura’s bits of paper, I’ve talked about a hundred million tax under consideration cases, the other cri-teria for getting a case automatically to the TDRB and Commissioners, is the five hundred million adjustment, even where there’s no tax at stake. So, you know, that may be because there’s, you know, a shed load of losses that’s likely to sort of mop up the adjustment, but once you get over five hundred million, even when there’s no immediate tax effect, Commissioners still take the decision on that. And then, the lines of business boards – transfer pric-ing [is] slightly different – but Enforcement and Compliance dispute resolution, Large Business dispute resolution, Specialist Personal Tax, they look at the cases below the hundred million but still pretty big. Generally, depending on the board, either between five and a hundred million, or fifteen and a hundred million, so still absolutely big cases.

And another thing a few people got a bit wrong on those check lists, the sample cases, which TDRB and the Commissioners look at, are a sam-ple of cases from these lines of business boards, so from Specialist Personal Tax, if it’s a Specialist Personal Tax case, and – the point I made earlier – it’s not just Specialist Personal Tax people who sit on that board, it’s a range of people, I for my sins, sit on most of the lower level boards here, sort of bringing a slightly external perspective, but there are various specialists, different lines of business, solicitors on those boards.

So that’s case governance, at times people think ‘oh blimey, there’s all these boards’, and it can feel a little bit like that at times, but the other side of governance, if you like, is issues governance. And that’s where the department has to set the strategy for a group of taxpayers. Avoidance is the typical one, where you’ve got a scheme that’s marketed, perhaps, and the department needs to decide on its approach to a particular avoidance scheme. You know, do we think it works, are we going to litigate, whatever, and obviously you then want to apply a consistent approach to our taxpayers. And

MOTIONS 40-49

Engagement, Career Management and a little miscellanyOn the last lap, AGM pushed through the final session. People were still angry; there was good debate, and then a call for more jokes.

There were two motions (in common debate) on engage-ment. MOTION 40 from Lon-don BCD called on Committee to engage with ExCom to get Nita Clarke to come back and review what had happened to

her report. Graham Keltie said it was a simple motion which would be easy to explain. He felt that Nita Clarke’s report had not been acted upon by management. The report “gave guidance on how HMRC could engage with employ-ees, increasing staff engage-ment and making sure that it can get the best out of all of us and we’d be happy giv-ing all that we can give. That seems to make sense in an organisation that consists of nothing else than of people. Two years on from receiving that document I don’t think we’ve been inundated with initiatives from this employer which promote engagement; I think probably it’s fair to say that the reverse is maybe a little bit true, when we’ve got things like a performance management system that is going to tell ten percent of you you’re rubbish.”

Perhaps conscious of pass-ing time and a busy agenda,

Edinburgh Centre moved MO-TION 41 formally. It also called for Nita Clarke to be commis-sioned to produce a follow-up report, agreeing with Lin Homer that the engagement scores in the 2013 staff survey and the level of participation were disappointing.

Motions 40 and 41 were then put to a vote without any further debate and both were passed.

Moving to Career Manage-ment, MOTION 42 from North East Centre was the first of three in common debate. It called for a coherent career structure for staff at Grade 7 and above, with recognition of all HMRC’s professions and the various methods of entry

to Grade 7. Emma Stearmen began by saying she had joined HMRC the previous September as a Grade 7 from one of the big four account-ancy firms. She contrasted the active career manage-ment of professionals in the private sector with the situa-tion in HMRC. “Whilst I accept the culture of HMRC is very different to that of the big four, and recognising there are pre-existing development programmes within HMRC, these do not go far enough in enabling the Grade 7s and above to reach their potential through active career man-agement whether through level moves or on promotion.”

MOTION 43 from South West Centre might, perhaps unfairly, be called more paro-chial. It noted the “imminent demise” of the Centre and blamed this on the poor ca-reer prospects for members in what it called ‘the far South West’. It called for dedicated career support for those in remote locations adversely affected by HMRC’s estates

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there are other issues for Business Tax conten-tious issues panel and the Personal Tax conten-tious issues panel to look at, and they’ve looked at all sorts of things, that apply to different tax-payers. They don’t feed sample cases up to the Commissioners, but they do if it is an issue that the whole board can’t agree the approach on, or it’s something particularly significant, and this year the Commissioners have looked at a couple of issues. One I can generally tell you about was a particular avoidance scheme, where the depart-ment needed to decide whether we’d put out a settlement opportunity, which meant all the people in that avoidance scheme could settle by paying up 70% of the tax, rather than us litigat-ing. And the decision – the firm decision – from the Commissioners was ‘no’. That would send out the wrong message in the context of where we are with avoidance, the Commissioners – even the non tax specialist Commissioner – they very quickly recognised [that] if they’re only paying 70%, then that’s not an outcome any of them would get at litigation, because it was an all or nothing issue at litigation. We might lose some at litigation, but the point is that’s the courts then deciding that they’re not going to pay the tax, not us. It could be perceived [as] ‘letting them off ’, if you like, 30% of the tax.

So that’s the sort of things the Commissioners decide on. Again, all the specialists are there, it’s all as open as we can be. Edward’s annual report, again, presents various facts and figures, maintaining taxpayer confidentiality, but being as transparent as we can be. I mentioned that the code is published as well, that has the codes that sets out how the boards work. As I said, the first annual report has a bit of background into how the boards work. And we have the internal review of settled cases. This is an important part of the overall governance and assurance picture. This is internal audit, going and looking at about a little over 400 actual cases, across the department, not just the big cases, very small cases as well, making sure that the governance processes appropriate to those cases has been followed. It’s randomly selected, stratified sample – because most of

our cases are small, you’d get 400 tiny cases if it was truly random – so they make sure they look at a strata of different sized cases throughout the department. And what they are looking at is whether governance processes have been fol-lowed. So, an important way of Edward being confident that we’re getting the right amount of tax is being able to demonstrate that we’re follow-ing the governance processes when we’re taking those decisions. We were criticised for not follow-ing those processes by NAO and Public Accounts Committee. And it’s a learning process, internal audit work closely with my team and quality assurance and quality checking teams across the line of business to make improvements where the review finds scope for improvements. So, look-ing back, it’s always a year behind, if you like, because what internal audit looked at last year were the cases that were closed the year before. So, in a sense, you’re always sort of playing catch up, and in an ideal world, the QA and QC teams and the lines of business will already be address-ing the problem, because they would have found them themselves already, already addressing the problems – or any problems – that internal audit have picked up from their review. Obviously that’s the idea, so that we’ve got the response to any-thing we find amiss, if you like. And, as you might expect, we didn’t get 100%.

There are these key areas for improvement, that we found from that internal audit report, and there is a lot of work going on in the lines of business, and with the QA/QC teams, making sure we have decent QA/QC in the new director-ate, Counter Avoidance, for instance, who, while they’re starting from scratch to get their own pro-cesses sorted out, they’ll be starting from a much better position than in the past, because they’ve got all the learning that we can feed to them, and the best practice from across the department. Just interesting – 78% there, internal audit themselves think if we get it to 85% in their terms, they see that as pretty good, so 100% is never going to be where we’ll get to, but it absolutely identifies where we can improve, so action and response to the findings, that’s just the work that’s going


on, but really a lot of it is building on the good practice, why some cases didn’t score so highly. It’s because the standards we’ve set ourselves are the highest standards that many people in the depart-ment are already applying, and that we need to make sure we apply more generally.

So, a summary of the key changes, and I guess this is what I’d like you to take away, because some people lose sight of this: We’ve always had governance, people have always taken care over the cases they’ve worked, they’ve always used their professionalism as well as they can. But the department has been under incredible scrutiny, and there still is occasional pressure from the outside that actually, we shouldn’t be policing our-selves over how we resolve tax disputes, we should perhaps have an external body, or external bodies, coming in and vetting our agreements, which for lots of reasons we don’t think would be workable. So while we did have things in place, we needed to change, and these are the key changes to keep in mind which make today’s world very different from the world of two years ago. So Edward does not engage with specific taxpayers, and he doesn’t manage case workers. The case workers and specialists attend Commissioners meetings, and other governance and board meetings to see the decision being taken, and it’s just not possible to have everybody who wants to observe one of these board meetings sit in, but you know, people do come along and observe, it’s relatively open. The three Commissioners taking the decisions, if they don’t all agree, push back, we don’t accept that proposal or the taxpayer’s position, and ultimately it’s litigation, the transparency through the annual report, and the publication of the code, and inter-nal audit looking across the lines of business, and looking at smaller cases.

So what we’re looking at builds on the best of what we had before; I’m not saying everything before was rubbish, it absolutely wasn’t, although we are sometimes criticised in that way. What we have done is built on the best that we had, but absolutely acknowledged that things needed to change, and what we’ve got now is a different story to what we had two years ago

policy, a presumption in fa-vour of digital distance work-ing and the reintroduction of home moves assistance and

daily travel allowance. Mark Doodney began his speech light-heartedly. “It’s finally come to pass that Devon and Cornwall are officially just somewhere nice to go for the weekend. As such there will clearly be no need for any skilled, decently paid jobs to allow the actual residents to buy the overpriced houses as we will need all hands on deck to sell ice creams and staff the seasonal beach car parks. After all, the last thing people having a nice week-end in the sun want is some uppity tax bod asking them where the money for the Fer-rari /yacht /helicopter came from and generally ruining the atmosphere.” He inferred from a recent Hotseat reply, plus the stated intentions of HMRC on the estate, that Cornwall, Devon and Somer-set would have no HMRC pres-ence by 2020. His conclusion mixed humour with gloom. “Do I have any suggestions for the future? Well, no, because I don’t have one. Generally I’m in favour of something between an armed rebellion and sulking, depending on the sort of day I’m having. Anyway, after 28 years I am off and so is most everyone I know, if not now then soon. ARC South West is also fold-ing because it’s too small now and it too will be gone shortly. I’m sure that some people will be quite glad to see ARC South West go, bear-ing in mind the reaction to some of the motions we put forward. Anyway, looking forward to my personal future I’d just like to say, would you

like a flake in that?” Mark left the podium to the sound of laughter.

MOTION 44 also came from a Centre who often see them-selves as remote, and who have consistently called for more SCS jobs in the North East and other provincial loca-tions. It called for a more even distribution of SCS jobs, point-ing out that this would benefit HMRC b making better use of available talent, not just those near London. Margaret

Sinkinson moved the motion, and quoted some statistics to back her argument. “In Newcastle Benton Park View, which is where I work there are 9000 staff or thereabouts, yet we’ve got seven SCS posts. Other large sites, for example Manchester and Nottingham, have about 12 or 13 SCS posts, but there’s a huge variation across the country and many sites only have two or three at the most. And then when we look at London, there are 200 out of the 300 SCS posts, so that speaks volumes.”

All three motions having been moved, it was time to move to a period of common debate, but no-one had any-thing to say on the motions which were immediately passed.

MOTION 45 from Glasgow Centre lamented the fact that SCS members had been excluded from the dispute with HMRC over terms and conditions and asked that in future, and where legally pos-sible, SCS members should also be balloted and involved in disputes with HMRC. Gra-ham Black, former President and a member of SCS him-self, moved for Glasgow. He opened with a simple call for solidarity. “Yes a member of ARC and a member of SCS

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HELEN BAIRD PARKER:

Hello AGM. I’m Helen Baird Parker. I’ve been working with colleagues including Terry Cook on ARC’s equal pay issues since 2010. I’m sorry I can’t be with you at

AGM today. It’s a very important year for us for many reasons but not least because on the third of April this year ARC lodged equal pay claims for 34 Grade 6 and Grade 7 women in the Employment Tribunal.

So the story so far. Our story began in 2010 when we sought volunteers. This resulted in us instructing our lawyers, Slater and Gordon, to look at the issue. They agreed with our view that there are serious doubts about the way HMRC’s pay system operates.

We then put in statutory questionnaires to HMRC for four Grade 7 women. This provided

us with some evidence about their pay as com-pared to the men that we compared them to. And on the back of these, we put in grievances claim-ing gender pay discrimination and seeking like pay for like work for those women.

Our four women came from different parts of HMRC. All are professionals, all have been in post for longer than eight years. Their grievances were heard by a specialist HMRC decision-maker last year. She upheld the grievances and recom-mended immediate talks with the Treasury to reach agreement about the HMRC pay system.

We were very pleased with that result though it’s fair to say that we hadn’t expected it. However, much to our surprise, HMRC decided not to honour the decision of their own specialist decision-maker. They said that they’d reviewed the pay system and they were satisfied that there was no discrimination, going against the clear and detailed findings of their own decision-maker. In ARC’s extensive experience

Equal PayHelen Baird-Parker (via video) and Terry Cook (in person, p48) gave a joint presentation on the state of play on Equal Pay.


of personal casework, not honouring your own decision maker’s decision is extremely unusual.

During the course of the grievances ARC had also put in statutory questionnaires for two Grade 6 women. There’s a statutory time limit for replying to questionnaires which is eight weeks. If an employer breaches this time limit, adverse inferences can be drawn against them in an employment tribunal claim. It took HMRC eight months to reply to those questionnaires. So we then put in grievances for those two Grade 6 women and HMRC has declined to deal with them at all on the basis that they’d looked at the issue already and it’s all fine.

So, our next step was to gather together all of the other ARC volunteers, our claimant women and their comparator men, and prepare their cases to be lodged en masse in the tribunal. Our counsel, Ben Cooper of Old Square Chambers is the best and most experienced in the business. He has won some of the most famous equal pay cases of recent years, Cadman and Wilson, together with some which were fought against the VOA, which is an executive agency of HMRC, by our sister union Prospect.

So this is where we are now. At the time of record-ing this message we’re still waiting for HMRC’s response to our claims. Then we’ll work towards get-ting the matter listed in the tribunal later this year.

For ARC, we’re still hopeful that this can be avert-ed and that HMRC will come and negotiate a sen-sible pay deal. We’ve been hoping for that for many years and so we’re not holding our breath. HMRC has brought this issue on itself by failing to deal sen-sibly with pay over a very long period of time

I want to thank you all for your involvement and to say a special thank you to our claimants and their comparators for putting themselves forward for this

Finally I just want to say I’m afraid I’m not going to be able to give you as detailed or as frequent updates on the progress of our case as some of you might like, and this is because in litigation matters are private until they’re heard and we don’t want to jeopardise any aspect of our case or our arguments. I’ll update you as much and as often as I can but don’t assume anything other than that our litigation is proceeding as planned unless you hear anything from me.

Thank you very much, and over to Terry.

and that means I had no part to play in any of the ballots that we’ve held recently in the union around the current dispute. No vote, no say, and ultimately no part to play in the action that everyone else took. Now on the 14th of Feb-ruary, when other ARC mem-bers were taking action or standing at picket lines, I was not in dispute with my em-ployer. I really don’t want that to happen to ARC members again. We want union mem-bers to stand together side by side, we want members across all ARC grades and all ARC professions to consider themselves part of the one union, we don’t want the employer to be able to pick

us off into smaller groups.” He accepted that legal advice had excluded SCS members on the basis that the PMR system complained of didn’t apply to them, but thought that consideration should then have been given to how the dispute could be widened so that SCS members could be legally included. While the motion concerned SCS mem-bers he pointed out that the principle applied elsewhere. “This time it happened to be SCS members, what happens if it was an issue that affected only trainees, are only train-ees supposed to have the vote and are only trainees sup-posed to take part in action? What if it only affects ac-countants or solicitors, is the rest of ARC supposed to stand aside?” To general applause, he concluded “I think this is about learning lessons, mak-ing sure that we don’t end up in this position again; one body, one union, one ARC. Support the motion please.”

The motion was passed without any other speakers.

And now for that miscel-lany. MOTION 46 from South West Centre put the cat among the pigeons. It pointed out that significant numbers of members leaving HMRC would benefit the rest as HMRC would have to do some-thing about pay and career prospects to staunch the flow. And it called for Committee to engage with an external re-cruitment agency to facilitate members leaving. Matthew Powell (pictured, left) began by reminding the AGM that it had thrown out a similar mo-tion from South West the pre-vious year, and his Centre had accepted the defeat with good

grace. “We would have done nothing more but for a recent debate on ARC forum started by Colin McHardy; thank you Colin for the mauling I’m about to receive.” He said that there was no lack of external opportunities for the young and keen, especially if they are in large urban centres. “But what of the experienced inspector who’s not in an urban centre, perhaps a bit older, perhaps always having thought that he or she was committed to a life in public service, but having seen their career opportunities disap-pear through no fault of their own, and possible their future employment under threat; no large accountancy firms in the vicinity, no obvious alternative jobs job prospects without a huge leap into the unknown or a large drop in income.” For such members an agency could provide a real service.

Colin McHardy got up to op-pose the motion on behalf of

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“In ARC’s extensive experience of personal casework, not honouring your own decision maker’s decision is extremely unusual.”



TERRY COOK:

I just want to say one or two things in addition to Helen’s excellent set-ting out of the issues and what we’ve been doing, and also I’m very happy to answer questions. We don’t have a great deal of time now but if anyone

wants to collar me over coffee or this evening, preferably before about nine o’clock, I’ll explain to you what we’re doing and try to answer any questions. I came off Committee a couple of years ago and, as some of you will know, as of two weeks ago I joined the ranks of the retired so I need to explain why I’m still here. My involvement with this goes back to March 2011 when Sarah Guerra and I first went to our lawyers to ask for their views on the poten-tial application of the equal pay legislation. We got a positive response and Committee set up a working group and in addition to Helen’s brilliant work in identifying potential claimants and supporting them and their comparators through the process, I also want to single out the contributions of John Parkhouse wherever he is and his expertise in the grievance pro-cess and also Wynne Parry our national officer who’s been working with Slater and Gordon to prepare the cases for tribunal. So in the light of my experience I’m really pleased that Gareth and Tony have asked me to carry on lending a hand with this. I want to play some part in the team not just because I feel that we have a very strong case on this, but also because I’m passionate about the subject and I’m also angry about the way HMRC has dealt with it.

One of our claimants is of the same vintage as me and I went to her retirement do a few weeks ago. And in her speech she recalled being told, as a young single woman in the 1970s, that she couldn’t have a mortgage because she’d soon be stopping work to have babies and so her income couldn’t be relied on. She went on to have a great career in the department and in the trade union movement in PCS and then ARC and she said in finishing her speech how sad she was that get-ting on for 35 years later women in HMRC were still not receiving fair and equal pay, and how proud she was that, as one of her last acts in the department, she was supporting ARC in our legal battle. But my question is: why does it have to be a battle. All along we sought to do this on a joint basis with the department and every time we’ve offered that to HMRC they’ve put their finger in their ears and simply hoped it would go away. You’ve heard that they’ve ignored the decision of their decision maker; they now tell us that they’ve got very strong legal advice to support their refusal to talk to us. Well they would do, wouldn’t they? I think it’s really sad that at the same time that ExCom is talking about things like trust and engagement they are forcing us to spend time and money fighting this legal battle. Why are they so reluctant to go to the Treasury and the Cabinet Office and tell them they want to sort this out? Why aren’t they showing some of that leadership that they talk so much about?

A couple of health warnings just to finish: we’ve been told we have a more than arguable case, we’ve got a leading counsel fighting for us but we don’t know what will happen if we get to


a hearing. Even if we win at the tribunal then that might not be the end of the legal process, the lead-ing cases went all the way to Europe and back again. And we know that, even though a whole string of equal value cases in local government were decided 15 years ago, in many cases individual councils still haven’t applied those principles. So potentially there is a long way to go. But I come back to the point I made just now, I sincerely hope that we don’t get trapped into that and that HMRC will see sense in talking to us. What we want them to do is just come to the negotiating table with some sensible proposals for getting us out of this mess, and the authority to agree a fair and transparent pay system that will last.

So, as Helen says, Committee will keep mem-bers as informed and involved as possible within the limits of litigation and negotiation. But I really really hope that this is the year, finally, that we sort out pay in HMRC. I’ve enjoyed coming and speak-ing to the AGM for many many years now but I really hope that come this time next year I’m not standing in front of you again and explaining why this fight goes on. But it is a fight and we’re fight-ing it well I think

Committee. He began by say-ing that Committee opposed the motion and he was there-fore asking representatives to vote against. But he then went on to make a couple of points which didn’t sound like whole-hearted opposition. “Some of us have been around a long time, can remember when we had recruitment and retention issues in HMRC and its prede-cessors. Some members obvi-ously thought their interests were best served elsewhere, and ARC and its predecessors were sorry to lose them. But when that happened, when we did have a recruitment and retention issue, we had a huge lever with the employers to improve the terms and con-ditions for the vast majority of the members remaining.”

Paula Houghton also spoke for Committee in opposition to the motion, and her posi-tion was clear. “The view of Committee is that at a time when we’re asking members to recruit, when we need to increase our density in order to be effective, why would we want to spend your subs and my subs helping people to leave? I understand the point; the department says they needn’t do anything because people aren’t leaving. But how many do we have to help to go before the Department takes notice? If we let a hun-dred go, ARC could possibly cope with that but it wouldn’t move the department. Five hundred? That’s over a fifth of our membership. Would that budge the department? I still don’t think it would. Half? Two thirds of our members? If that does make the department take notice, who would be left to make them do something about it?”

She was supported by

Graham Keltie from London BCD. “ARC can only negotiate in any meaningful way with the employer if two things are true: one, we’ve got a de-cent membership base, and helping get rid of people isn’t going to help that; and two, if we are valued as employees and what we do is valued. So we need to be staying and making sure that we’re pro-viding the best service we can possibly provide to this coun-try, doing what we do best, not looking to go elsewhere and what will be perceived as looking after our own best interests.”

Exercising his right of reply, Matthew Powell rejected that argument about membership density. “ARC membership isn’t determined by how many

people leave the department, it’s determined by the size of the department and the density of membership and we improve density by giving members what they need.”

Despite this passionate ap-peal, the motion was then put to the vote and was lost.

MOTION 47 from South and West Wales was short and to the point. It noted a 40% increase in domestic flights by HMRC staff and instructed Committee to make a free-dom of information request to establish the purpose of the flights. Tamsin Wallbank re-vealed that she already knew the answer: the flights were caused by the need for great-er management visibility and by PMR. “Managers have to go and have these meetings, it’s costing us money, can we please ask the question so we can embarrass them with it please.” Eugene Mitchell op-posed for Committee on the basis of limited resources. This was not a priority and

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“We’ve been told we have a more than arguable case, we’ve got a leading counsel fighting for us but we don’t know what will happen if we get to a hearing.”



GARETH HILLS: OK, we’re coming up to four o’clock so just some quick closing remarks from me. Thank you for a very successful day. Michelle, Graham and Terry are here, all three of them are past Presidents, and all of them told me how relieved I’m going to feel tomorrow when I wake up. I’m not sure about that, I think it rather depends on tonight, and tomorrow I’m on FDA Vice-Presidential duty back up on this platform. I will wake up though proud to have been ARC president, and knowing that the presidency passes to a Celtic soul-brother Tony Wallace.

I want to thank proce-dure sub-committee, John Parkhouse, Paula Houghton, Graham Flew and Wynne Parry, and also to thank Wynne for the way he’s operated not just the lights but the presenta-tions of our guests. The dinner tonight is at 6.30 for drinks and 7.15 for the sit-down, we’re back in the Grand Connaught rooms. I’ll see you all there, I hope, for what I’m sure will be another enjoyable evening. Thank you for today. See you all this evening.

TONY WALLACE: Can you just hang on and indulge me for five minutes longer because there is one final act that we do have to perform at Conference and it falls upon me as the incoming President to do that. And in fact it’s a pleasure to do it and it’s to thank the man who’s sitting to my right for all of the hard work that he’s given to this union on behalf of us and you for the last two years. It’s a bit of a cliché to say that an outgoing leader is a hard act to follow, but in actual fact on this occasion, and as anybody who’s known him for any time at all will recognise, in Gareth Hills it’s absolutely true.

Gareth was made for this role. He’s got all of the creden-tials you’d expect from a man from the valleys: left-leaning, fiery, an orator of consummate skill, but Gareth is above all else a realist and a pragmatist. He knows what our members need, he knows what they want, and he knows how the expecta-tions and aspirations can best be delivered. We are a small union of senior professionals and leaders, and our strengths lie in the proper, intelligent and meaningful dialogue with our

employer. That’s what our mem-bers overwhelmingly expect. Gareth knew that instinctively and conducted his business of the Presidency accordingly. In a cool and a professional way, but always remembering first and foremost to represent his members as best that he can. Gareth’s been the right man for the right time.

The last two years have been as difficult a two years as any-one has seen in this union, it’s certainly the most difficult two years I’ve seen. And it’s prob-ably the most difficult two years that anyone’s had to bear in any civil service union in as many years as anyone can remember. We’ve a government which has, in reacting to an economic cri-sis made by others, set about systematically to roll back the rights, terms and conditions that have been earned by people like us for very many years. Now that’s been quite depressing at times, to be frank, and the pres-sure that Gareth has faced in trying to prevent the worst of those excesses, while steering this ship, has been immense. Don’t forget that when the con-versation around terms and con-ditions began a year and a half

It’s a wrapThe AGM always concludes with a few brief remarks from the President, and another officer then usually thanks the President for their chairing of the meeting.


ago, the language was all about what will be taken away and the extent of what was being done to us was far wider than what we’re seeing today. There was to be no discussion, no dialogue, but that is not the way that it’s turned out and that’s in no small part due to the work that Gareth has done.

He’s borne the pressures unflinchingly, he’s handled everything that’s been thrown at him with aplomb, he’s travelled to all but one Centre in the last two years time after time after time to ask our members what it is that they really want. He spent far more nights in London than I think even he expected, and he’s led this union in its first independent industrial action in its history. It was sug-gested that Gareth wouldn’t deliver that action, but I defy anyone to say – and I mean this, I defy anyone to say – that he did not give of his all to produce the turnout that we needed to demonstrate to our employer the seriousness of our intent as a union and deliver that outcome he did. That to me is the very essence of what you expect of the leader of a member-led organisation like ours.

This hasn’t been easy for him: he’s a man who loves his family and we’re dead pleased to see Sarah here today, I’ve spent a lot of time with Gareth in London over the past couple of years, and there hasn’t been a single night when I’ve been here, when he hasn’t been in that room in Leake St face-timing Sarah, Megan and Rosie, though he’s obviously telling me he misses them. It’s absolutely true. And through all of that he’s managed to keep the reputation and the profile of ARC as high as it could be in the outside world.

His campaigning work in Delivering for the Nation and Careers not Quotas has been exemplary, the parliamentary event where he managed to get David Gauke, Catherine McKenna and Jim Williams was outstanding, and Vanessa will be back here tonight, she chaired the event on that occasion. He’s managed to steer a difficult course with HMRC senior lead-ers and he’s worked tirelessly in his role as Vice-President of the FDA to ensure that ARC’s voice is heard more clearly and effec-tively than ever in that forum.

We are in industrial action currently, but that won’t last forever. And the work Gareth’s done on a personal and profes-sional basis to ensure that our reputation is not damaged irre-vocably will pay us dividends in the future for my Committee going forward. Above all else I’ve had the great pride and opportunity to see Gareth operate at first hand. Make no mistake; he’s as tough with the employer as he sometimes seems to be with Conference and with Committee. And whilst I’ve always wanted this job, I do think I should have waited a bit longer and not tried to fol-low the red-faced angry man to my right. Conference and col-leagues, I give you my friend, the builder whose noble purpose is delivering for the nation, Mr Gareth Hills.

the things in the ARC business plan are much more important. Mick Lett, also from Commit-tee, assumed that the motion was serving a green agenda, but argued that the presence or absence of HMRC staff on the flights con-cerned would not determine whether the flight took place. Motion 47 was then put to the vote and lost.

MOTION 48 from 100 PS Centre called for greater support for managers, criticised the ser-vice managers receive from the advice line and fingered PMR as a drain on managers’ time and resource. Tracy Gribbin, conscious of the time, moved the motion formally, there were no other speakers and the motion was passed.

Gareth Hills then called for MOTION 49 from South and West Wales Centre, commenting “I’m looking forward to this.” He may have been referring to the motion, to the end of his Presidency (which was literally moments away, ARC Committee terms of office ending at the conclusion of the AGM) or to both. The motion read: That this AGM notes that the 2015 AGM could use some jokes and instructs Committee to book appropriate entertainment.

Tamsin Wallbank came back to the podium to propose, but all she said – to much laughter – was “Mick [Lett]’s already called this crap, so do what you like, I formally move the motion.”

Peter Horne pictured, top), London BDC, said, to more laughter, that we should oppose because “we’ve already got a comedian in Gra-ham Flew (pictured, bottom), and we can al-ways have Mick Lett do a routine about death. Why do we need a professional?”

The miscellany then lingered on as Gareth Hills called a vote, found it too close to call, and called for scrutineers. After a count the motion had lost by 39 to 31. As Gareth put it “By eight. There’s a coincidence.”1

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1 Eight votes was the margin by which members rejected Com-mittee’s recom-mendation in the then recent ballot on a man-agement offer on terms and condi-tions and PMR, precipitating the ballot on indus-trial action.



A STANDING OVATION FOR GRAHAM BLACK


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LARGE BUSINESS REVIEW

T he new Large Business

directorate opened for service on 1 April 2014. What follows are my reflections on the setting-up period and the issues and concerns arising therefrom, from my role as one of ARC’s Business Tax portfolio holders. Work continues as the new directorate beds in and much detail remains to be discussed.

ARC was not consulted on the decision to set up the Large Business directorate. While that was disappointing, HMRC is entitled to manage its business and there is no requirement to dis-cuss strategic decisions like this with ARC. And while the devil is, as always, in the detail, ARC is supportive in principle of the decision to manage all CRM-led businesses in a single directorate. After all, HMRC has a single large business strategy and a single CRM model. So why would it make sense to split the large busi-ness CRM population, applying the same large

Large Business Review: How was it for you?

Colin McHardy reflects on the changes to how we deal with large businesses.


business strategy and CRM model across two directorates?

The Department indicated that while ARC (and PCS) had not been consulted on the decision to set up the large business directorate, ARC (and PCS) would be fully consulted on implementation. ARC was kept informed of progress via regular dis-cussions with Official Side and ARC was successful in securing some use-ful changes, for example in relation to locations and in relation to arrangements for specialist teams. However ARC was not as involved in the decision-making process as fully as we would have liked to have been.

Given the timetable for the set-up of the new directorate and given the Department’s desire to “deliver at pace” the scope for consultation was always going to be limited and one of the concerns ARC raised at the outset was this very short timescale. Official side acknowledged this but indicated that they wanted to mini-mise the period of uncertainty for staff and that they wanted the new directorate to be in place for the

start of the 14/15 reporting year on 1 April 2014. So despite ARC’s best efforts, the Department was not per-suaded of the case to take more time. And the position was not assisted by the fact that the “mid-size” review, covering the treatment of the remaining non-CRM popula-tion, was running in parallel to the same timescale.

Going forward, “delivering at pace” and the setting of short time-scales for major projects should not be given as a reason for failing to fully consult. I am reminded here of

the old saying; “Marry in haste; repent at leisure!”

Also, while I don’t know if the pace of change was the reason, ARC received very little feedback from members in the run-up to the crea-tion of the Large Business directo-rate. The pace of change also meant that there was little to communicate which wasn’t covered by HMRC communications, which ARC had early sight of.

It was always understood that, given the timescale, the bulk of appointments to the new directorate would be managed moves. ARC accepted this in principle, agreeing it would be unhelpful to again go through a full Organisational Design exercise, which had only recently been completed for HMRC, for the new directorate, but ARC expected there would be some room for expressions of interest at the mar-gins. But many new job roles creat-ed as a result of the review process were filled by management appoint-ment, with the short timescale being cited as the reason for the lack of

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“ARC was informed at the outset that there was no driver to reduce resources applied to Large Business work. However... the numbers transferring over from Large & Complex were less than initially envisaged.”


running even “expressions of inter-est” processes and this led to some bad feeling among members. How-ever in the interests of balance I should also note that some residual vacancies are being filled through open competition, offering promo-tion opportunities for some ARC members, which is good news.

Resourcing is also a potential issue. ARC was informed at the out-set that there was no driver to reduce resources applied to Large Business work. However while the quasi totality of staff from the Large Business Service transferred across to the new directorate, the numbers transferring over from Large &

Complex were less than initially envisaged, leaving the new Large Business directorate with fewer staff than initially expected to deal with CRM cases. And as someone who has been involved with large busi-ness for many years, I note that the new Large Business directorate is back to approximately the same size as the Large Business Service was when HMRC was formed. However LB has more than twice as many groups to deal with in 2014 as the LBS had in 2005.

Another concern relates to the CRM role. The CRM role has been recognised as key in previous Large Business structures. However in the

Large Business directorate, most CRMs are no longer members of local senior leadership teams; CRMs are spread over several teams and tiers, many CRMs have acquired additional cases to manage and lines of accountability for groups, previ-ously clear from CRM to Deputy Director, are now somewhat blurred. Time will tell how these concerns are mitigated.

To summarise, while ARC agrees in principle with the reasons behind the creation of the Large Business directorate, and can see some posi-tives arising, there are also some ongoing concerns, which ARC will do its best to mitigate

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