I have argued for some time that the management of HMRC needs to be radically reformed. My focus has been on the non-executives, whose collective backgrounds suggest the organisation has been captured by the Big 4 accountants and big business, but the Public Accounts Committee has today turned on the executive. The Guardian has reported:
The chief executive of Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs is battling to keep her job after a group of MPs said they had little confidence in her abilities following a "catastrophic leadership failure" in her former role in charge of Britain's immigration system.
The Commons home affairs select committee said Lin Homer repeatedly misled them for years when she was chief executive of the UK Border Agency over the size of the backlogs in asylum and immigration, which now top more than 310,000 cases. Describing the system as "chaotic", the MPs said the backlog would take 24 years to clear at the current rate of progress.
In one of the most severe attacks by a Commons committee on a named Whitehall senior civil servant, the MPs said they were "astounded" when they learned that Homer had been promoted to become the £180,000-a-year chief executive and permanent secretary at HMRC.
I agree. And said so at the time of the appointment.
It's not as if there wasn't warning: Homer's reign in Birmingham also ended with what the Guardian calls "sharp criticism" over a vote rigging scandal. And, as ever under Margaret Hodge the PAC hits its target:
A report by the committee published on Monday demands that parliament should in future be given a veto over leading civil service appointments to ensure there is no repeat of the Homer case.
"The status quo, in which catastrophic leadership failure is no obstacle to promotion, is totally unacceptable," the MPs say. "We recommend that in future any failures of this nature should have serious consequences for the individual's career."
That seems fair to me.
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Richard, you mean the Home Affairs Select Committee (which oversees the UKBA); not the Public Accounts Committee.
Regrettably, Lin Homer was there as a “Patsy” for the Big 4. She shouldn’t be the only one that faces the sack. A purge at the top is needed to clear out Big 4 representatives.
A report by the committee published on Monday demands that parliament should in future be given a veto over leading civil service appointments
Tread very carefully here, Richard. Without proper constitutional controls in place, you could end up with a politicised civil service.
We have got just that
If we turn this on its head, Richard, and look at it from the perspective of the compromised and corporately corrupted board, then Homer is, in fact, exactly the type of CE that they needed to follow on from the previous paragon of virtue (not).
As you, The Guardian, and Private Eye, have noted previously, she has form stretching back a long way. Indeed she is one of a number of civil servants who’ve come from local government (including the current head of the civil service if my memory serves me correctly). No doubt the managerial skills they learnt there – and particularly that of showing disdain and disregard for almost all elected representatives – plays well in the upper echelons of the modern day civil service.
Indeed
I honestly believe that they think they are right, and that we are all ‘tax prats’
http://www.taxation.co.uk/taxation/Articles/2013/02/06/53361/tax-prat-year
@pwright Agreed – and this is surely yet more evidence of the move towards a neo-feudal state.
For in such a state, positions of authority and influence are awarded on the basis of status and rank, not talent, something that, despite our having supposedly emerged from feudalism with the accession of Henry Vll in 1485, was still going on in this country well into the mid-19th century, until the Crimean War highlighted the obvious failures of that system, with obtuse Generals who had only obtained command because they were Lord So and So. Remember the Charge of the Light Brigade fiasco, and, of course, the nursery rhyme about “The Grand Old Duke of York” who only achieved command because he was a royal Prince.
The outcome was the Northcote-Trevelyan Report of 1854, which led to the professionalization of our Civil Service, but we should never forget that it was the suffering of the ordinary soldiers, plus the clear and present threat presented by mass movements such as the Chartists, and the growing Trades Union movement, that actually led to this shift away from status and rank towards ability and merit.
What we have now, then, is an elite that wishes to expunge 150 plus years of social progress, and set us back to at least 1850, and preferably to early 19th century, and the corrupt rule of Lord Liverpool, whose 15 years as PM will be forever blackened by the horror of the Peterloo Massacre of 1819, when 15 people were killed and over 400 injured by armed cavalry, who charged a crowd who were peacefully protesting about the lack of political freedom, and in particular about not being able to vote.
Tax prats, or Tax serfs? Both, I suspect.
Richard,
You seem to have missed the fact that between the UKBA & HMRC there was the DfT….
Messed up train bids & all that!
Agreed – 12 months there