Speeches by Blake.

“ There is £350 million.”

“ In ’24-25, there is an additional £275 million, if I have read the table correctly, for additional income generated by additional staff on debt management.”

“ That was an announcement made in the Budget, so you only have five months to generate that additional income. Can you give us a sense of how you are getting on towards that target, given that the officers are in place? It has been a month.”

“ Another line that I wanted to focus on was line 18: “Increased collection of overdue tax debt by additional investment in HMRC debt management staff”. You have a target of £275 million in five months. How are you getting on?”

“ Lastly on this particular line—£35 million next financial year. How confident are you in reaching that? Relatively few investigations could yield that if you have a good hit rate, as you say, but how confident are you in that £35 million next year?”

“ I am sure Governments of all colours would like this to happen. This is not a particularly political debate whether or not you increase tax receipts from systems, so is there a particular reason this has been introduced now? Were you not keen to do it under a previous Government?”

“ We will come on to AI separately. I wanted to understand this system. Is it something to which you are going to be allocating more resource? Is that how you are changing the system—by moving more people on to the investigations? What is it that you are changing in the system?”

“ Could you give us a little more detail on what those systems might include? We have some questions further on in the session about AI and analysis, but what exactly will you be doing? Are you seeking to find more complex cases to raise significantly larger sums in fewer investigations, or is it flatter, smaller s…”

“ Thank you for joining us. It is good to meet you. I wanted to probe some of the Budget measures to close the tax gap. I am particularly interested in the table which sets out some of these measures, and in line 19: “Increasing tax receipts from modernising HMRC systems and data”, anticipating an additional £35 mi…”

“ I want to push on this point about additional staff. In April 2024, you spoke about having “to reduce the size of our customer service group by about 5,000 staff.” You have talked about the 1,200 who are essentially just safe, based on previous cuts to staffing. How quickly…”

“ You have talked about ramping up staff and training them in order to generate the additional income that you have anticipated. The additional income is really quite significant and, if this additional income does not materialise, we do get close to not meeting fiscal rules. Clearly, therefore,&#xa0…”

“ Are you able to say what kind of iterative correspondence you had with the OBR in terms of the confidence and risks around these estimates?”

“ So if those yields are not generated, will it be the fault of HMRC?”

“ My final set of questions is really about policy, regarding line 13. The reason why I am inquiring about this is the relatively small level of income—additional yield—that you have identified in here. “Amending anti-avoidance rules to ensure shareholders cannot extract funds untaxed from close companies from 30 O…”

“ HMRC is a supervisor for businesses that are governed by money laundering regulations, and you did 3,629 interventions in the last financial year. To what extent does your anti-money laundering capacity actually compete with some of your other teams for resource?”

“ Entirely?”

“ Would it then be capped?”

“ On the point of supplementing and potentially needing to supplement, how are you assessing whether the fees are enough to expose the extent of money laundering?”

“ Could you say which sector that is concentrated in?”

“ Is that where you are needing to do most of your education?”