"At the level of the business as a
whole, HMRC has no strategy to manage the £96 million it spends
each year on skills. Although the Department is doing much to make
sure it has the skills it requires, it needs a more systematic
approach, where spending on skills is linked explicitly to the
organization’s overall business objectives and a vision of how it
should look in the future."
Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, 1
December 2011
HM Revenue and Customs will have to make sure
its staff have the right skills if the Department is to succeed in
cutting its running costs by 25 per cent by 2014-2015 and bringing
in each year an extra £7 billion of tax revenue.
The National Audit Office has today reported
to Parliament that HMRC does not know how much it is spending in
total on skills development, or if its money is being spent in the
right places. The National Audit Office estimates that HMRC spent
£96 million in 2010-11 developing the skills of its staff but
judges that the Department is not systematically directing that
spending on top level business priorities.
The Department has recognized that it has
significant challenges and is doing much to ensure it has the
skills it needs. It is developing major professional
programmes, using new technologies and fast-tracking training for
key roles. Staff skills will have been a factor in the improvement
of HMRC’s business results including the extra £1billion tax
generated since 2010 by enforcement and compliance activity.
But currently there is not a direct evidential link between results
and training and development activities. The majority of staff in
HMRC (79 per cent in the 2011 staff survey) say that they have the
skills they need to do their job effectively. However, only
54 per cent said that they were able to access the right learning
and development opportunities when they needed to and only 38 per
cent said that training had improved their performance.
Evidence from a customer survey and external
stakeholders also suggests that the Department does not have all
the skills it needs, but HMRC does not have a good overview of its
current skills gaps. It needs better data and information on gaps
which would help it take a more strategic approach and gain an
early warning of future skills gaps, such as the risk of skills
depleting as experienced staff retire. This is of particular
concern in HMRC as one in five staff in key business areas are over
55.
HMRC is spending money on skills development
in some key business areas but does not yet have a skills strategy
to direct spending systematically towards areas that produce the
most important business results and which links to a model of how
the organization will operate in the future. There is an absence of
engagement at senior level in staff skills and there is no specific
body that examines the total spending on skills and decides whether
it is being made in the right parts of the organization.
HMRC also lacks governance arrangements or
structures to hold the organization to account for money spent on
training. Many of the points in this report were raised previously
by HMRC’s own reviews but the Department has not made the changes
needed. For example, HMRC’s total number of training courses has
not reduced from 2,000 courses in 2009 when an internal review
raised concerns about poor focus in training provision.
Publication details:
HC: 1595, 2010-2012
ISBN: 9780102976991