According to The Evening Standard, London' evening paper:
In a letter to Sir Jon [Thompson, Hmrc's boss] Mr Javid said: "HMRC must make no deal preparation their absolute top priority as the UK prepares to exit the European Union on 31st October 2019, with or without a deal."
He said HMRC must deliver "critical internal systems and staffing" to function on October 31, including the 5,000-plus additional staff required to support and handle the increase in businesses making customs declarations.
Mr Javid also said HMRC should work across Whitehall to set up an "ambitious" central helpline to support firms with concerns about Brexit.
He said customs officials must work with counterparts from the Treasury, Home Office, Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and Border Force to deliver the "necessary changes to customs, tax and welfare arrangements in order to ensure a smooth exit and transition".
In his instructions to Sir Jon, Mr Javid said he expected to receive "weekly delivery-focused updates from HMRC to ensure progress remains on track" in the run-up to October 31.
I could apologise for quoting at length but this is obviously reproduced press release, so I won't.
What I do say are four things. First, there is no organisation on earth that could do this. Expanding by about 10% in staff terms, and making those additional personnel fully functional in that time period, which includes summer holidays, is impossible.
Second, it is a well known fact that HMRC has never delivered a critical system on time. It won't be different now.
Third, the changes required to customs, welfare and tax arrangements will on occasion require legislation, and Javid must know he has no chance of delivering such changes by 31 October.
So, fourthly, what this proves is that Sajid Javid is a fantasist, living in his Brexit bunker, thinking that writing a letter will solve a problem. It won't. Just a monent's thought on his part would make that obvious.
So why has he done this?
Because he's stuoid?
In a pre-emptive attempt to pass the buck?
Because a moment's thought challenges his ability to concentrate too much?
Or simply because he really is is a fantasist?
I suspect it is all four.
I wish all the staff at HMRC well in the impossible time that they are facing.
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Richard – are we not already in the ‘silly season’ anyway?
But Cummings seems to be right: The Toxies don’t give a damn do they?
it doesn’t matter if it is fantasy. The true believers will swallow it. Javid understands the first rule of politics. Lies win votes. Just as long as you can blame someone else when it all goes pear-shaped. By spending half an hour writing a letter, he has ensured that everything will be the fault of HMRC.
I expect that’s what he’s hoping, and in the right context he might have gone some way to getting away with this. On the established basis you can fool some people all of the time and all people some of the time but not all of the people all of the time, this blame-shifting policy isn’t going to work. They’re trying to tell too many lies to too many people at the same time and it’s getting obvious.
What he and others in the Cabinet are exhibiting is faith. Faith will move mountains. Mr Johnson has has ascended to Downing Street proclaiming a gospel, that the Kingdom of Brexit is near. His way has beeen prepared by that voice crying in the wilderness, Nige the Faragist. Now the Promised One has come declaring that blessed are those that hunger after righteousness and brexitness, for they shall see No Deal. The doomsters and gloomsters are but whited sepulchres who build their houses upon sand. Faith will move mountains. He will lead the faithful to cast out the thieves and bandits in the Temple, he will ascend into WTO and his kingdom will have no end. Mr Johnson can walk on water, and Mr Javid should leave the storm tossed boat in the storm and walk to his master who will grasp his hand and save him from the waves. Gloomsters and doomsters have no faith. If 5000 can be fed with five loaves and two fishes, assuredly Mr Javid can Mr Javid, now Mr Johnson’s chief acolyte, now having faith, will be able to lead HMRC to deliver thousands of customs officials in but a few weeks.
I am sorry you don’t seem to have faith, Richard. We must pray for you.
Keep trying…they’re not getting to me 🙂
We might also ask whetherhe has asked HMRC to scrap its ludicrous “building no future” plans whereby it is closing the majority of its offices, and making thousands of trained, experienced professionals redundant?
If 5000 extra staff were really being recruited that would be welcome. Even if we stayed in the customs union we could find plenty of work or them from sharing information from tax havens, properly enforcing the EU’s barriers against countrys like China, and following up the information HMRC has about every credit card transaction made in the UK. But they have not recruited in time and I don’t believe they will now.
Somehow we need to get over to the public that the Tory plan under WTO rules means the EU will erect tariff walls against UK goods, but we are not allowed to retaliate and will continue with 0% tafiffs against their’s. Most brexit voters would consider this a lunatic policy.
Excluding HMRC staff from any public sector pay rise does not look too clever either.
Well said
I heard a rumour that all HMRC staff leave was to be cancelled for August unless you had a booked holiday. Also when I worked in Customs and Excise it took 3 years to train a VAT officer and two years to train a Customs officer. So we will have the prospect of poorly trained unwilling people trying to administer only partly functioning systems and the result will be lots of errors and incorrect information given to traders and an increasing panic as 31 October approaches
Stop talking our country down, Richard! You just need to be positive and hope for the best and it will all be fine!
Jokes aside, it is worrying. I suspect that he really is that clueless.
It all reminds me of the bunker scene in downfall where Hitler is trying to order around non existent batallions of soldiers.
I didn’t say that….. 🙂
Just further evidence (were it needed) that brexit is now more of a religious belief system than a political policy…
Just believe hard enough and it will all magically come true!
You really could not make this stuff up.
Indeed, I have heard a rumour that HMRC wanted to ban staff leave in August unless they had a holiday booked. When I worked in Customs and Excise it took 3 years to train a VAT Officer and 2 years a Customs Officer. So we have the prospect of poorly trained unwilling staff having to try to run unfamiliar and only partially functional systems – with the risk of incorrect advice and poor decisions given to traders -a recipe for chaos.
I think you mean something that was suggested by Jeremy Hunt during the Tory leadership campaign, and was civil service wide rather than specific to HMRC. And I don’t recall that he even had the grace to consider that large numbers of civil servants taking leave this summer might already have booked their holidays.
It rather looks, to use a football analogy, like Mr Javid is warming up his scapegoats…
They will blame anyone but themselves. That’s their strategy and has been since day 1. My wife wrote to our MP, one of the baker’s dozen in Scotland, asking that he vote against crashing out with a “no deal”. Sorry, couldn’t oblige, it’s all the fault of certain “other” parties who voted against May’s deal. Well, of course it is, nothing to do with the second worst PM of all time who with hubris the size of Johnson’s ego thought he could put the Euro Sceptics back in their box and save the Tory Party.
Well, the compulsive liar may save his Party, but the country can go to hell – apart from himself and his rich friends. Which is another thing, crashing out won’t affect them and the top few percent.
All of those who’ve made the point that HMRC can’t possibly be ready in time for 31st October are correct. I speak as an HMRC employee and I can tell you the following:
– As of last week (and I’ve not heard anything to the contrary since), Jon Thompson is leaving HMRC in the autumn to head up the FRC. So HMRC is to change its head of department as the ‘cliff-edge’ looms. Not exactly a good sign, is it?
– Due to the office closure program, all HMRC employees are going to have detailed 1 to 1 conversations with their managers starting 1st November. And people will be preparing for these well before that date i.e. in the run up to 31st October. As well as trying to do their regular jobs.
– As Old Codger (hello ex HMRC employee!) says, it takes a lot more than 3 months to train people to handle tax and customs issues. It’s pure fantasy land.
Javid is not a stupid man, and took a remain position as regards Brexit. He is simply, like the few other remainers left in the Cabinet (e.g Rudd), a moral coward who’s put his own career prospects ahead of the good of the UK. Hence he goes along with Johnson’s nonsense about no-deal and plays the part in this ‘can-do’ administration of fervent believers who say they’re doing their best to deliver ‘holy Brexit’.
Then when it is a disaster, they can blame (a) May’s government as it was full of ‘traitorous remainers’ like Hammond who allegedly held back no-deal preparations; (b) civil servants who according to blustering fools like Frederick Forsyth, are 90% remainers. (Which is rubbish, I know too many of my fellow civil servants who voted for this idiocy); (c) the EU, for not offering the UK conditions in a WA that would break its own rules.
Thanks
It has already been announced that Thompson is stepping down “in the autumn” to lead the successor to the FRC. https://www.gov.uk/government/news/sir-jonathan-thompson-to-step-down-as-hmrc-chief-executive-in-the-autumn
Does that mean he is more or less likely to be named as the scapegoat when Sajid’s ambitious plans fall short?
Probably……
At which point will Javids work in the 2008 GFC become an issue?
The whole lot of these unhinged britons are carrying the most noxious baggage – their presence as the Cabinet is based on the Dirty Dozen. It is their final function to use their psychopathy in a harikari last ditch attempt to stop the reversal of their neolib/con project AND get the hard brexit!
Although, If they are throwing money around , i’m happy to sign up and collect it from the front line … could do with some xmas spondulis!
I am reminded of another beginning of August crisis which led to great expansion – that which hit the British Army 105 years ago. At the end of July it had (at its main Central London recruiting office) a handful of recruits daily. After the crisis hit it was besieged by thousands – the staff needed a police escort to get them through the crowd. The first thing they ran out of was attestation forms – while that could easily be sorted, most other things were far more difficult. And then it took a couple of years for the new formations to go up against the enemy en masse – but still inexperienced.
This is the much vaunted Tory efficiency being rolled-out, eh?
In three months HMRC, Whitehall, Border Force and everybody else in a benighted and skeletal Public Sector are to do what they would have struggled to achieve in three years.
Yeah. Right. If all this recruitment is to happen it rather casts doubt on the employment figures we’ve been fed for the past decade. Even so, it isn’t going to be possible in three months across summer holiday season given that staff trainers can’t know what systems they are training staff to work with. (Because they don’t exist yet, and likewise most of the staff trainers probably don’t exist either.)
I don’t know what the Tory cabinet is smoking or sniffing, but I think it should be legalised forthwith. 🙂