2:54pm Thursday 14th January 2010
By Chris Holland
More than 40 tax office jobs in Keighley and Skipton are to be axed under plans to close another 130 offices nationally.
The Keighley office in Worth House has 16 staff, with 28 affected at Cavendish House, Skipton.
Remaining staff at the two offices, which have already been scaled down, will leave by April 2011. They have been given until February 8 to choose between voluntary redundancy or to be considered for redeployment.
Trudy Bates, Bradford branch president of the Public and Commercial Services Union, said scaling down the offices had begun in 2006 with surviving staff left in ‘phantom’ locations worrying about their future.
She said: “Operations have increasingly been centralised by Revenue and Customs and local tax offices no longer deal with their local areas. We don’t believe this centralisation has improved services.
“People are very upset. It shows HMRC no longer values experience as several of those in Keighley and Skipton have 30 years’ service.”
She warned that any move towards compulsory redundancies would be likely to lead to strike action.
The closure plans affect more than 120 jobs in West and North Yorkshire, with offices in Halifax, Huddersfield, Wakefield and Pontefract also due to close.
Up to 1,700 jobs will be axed nationally and the PCS warned services would suffer.
More than 20,000 jobs have been axed since 2006, while over the same time HMRC had effectively written off £11bn in uncollected tax, the PCS claimed.
An HMRC spokesman said the plans were aimed at ensuring the right number of people with the right skills were in the right places following an “exhaustive study” in 2008.
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