OSWESTRY tax office is to close with the loss of up to 22 jobs, it was announced last week.
The office in Middleton Road is one of 23 offices earmarked for closure in the West Midlands with up to 500 jobs being cut throughout the region.
Unions are angry that the closures, which are planned for the end of March, will mean even more people evading paying tax and have vowed to strike if any compulsory redundancies are imposed on its workforce.
A Public and Commercial Services Union official has called upon the Oswestry public to fight the closures and says he fears public access will be lost if the Middleton Road office is allowed to close.
Mr Alwyn Mason, branch secretary for PCS’s revenue and customs members in North Wales and Marches, said that it was a bad blow for his members and for Oswestry.
“At the moment they are saying they will not close to the public, but if they are talking about reducing the hours, what will the next step be? I suspect that the public will lose it altogether,” he said.
Karen Slough, a member of the Midlands regional group executive committee, said there was a lot of pressure to volunteer for redundancy.
“It is happening really quickly. We do not know what is going to happen to those members whose circumstances mean that they cannot volunteer,” she explained.
“There is £20billion worth of tax going uncollected and we have already shed 20,000 jobs from the revenue. They now want to shed even more which will lead to even more money going uncollected,” she predicted.
Review
Other offices in the West Midlands announced for closure include those at Shrewsbury, Burton on Trent, Cannock, Evesham, Hereford, Ludlow, Nuneaton, Redditch, Rugby, Stafford and Stratford-upon-Avon.
A spokeswoman for the HMRC said the closures followed an “exhaustive” review in the wake of the merger of the Inland Revenue and Her Majesty’s Customs and Excise. She said workers would be offered a severance package to leave the company in March while “every effort” would be made to find an alternative position within HMRC or in another civil service department for those who did not want to take redundancy.
She added that all offices with a public inquiry function that had been earmarked for closure would retain some kind of presence. In total around 1,700 staff nationally faced either redundancy or redeployment.