Speeches by Murray.

“I am politically responsible for delivery.”

“As I say, I do not get involved in individual taxpayer cases.”

“I cannot bind the hands of future Ministers, but this is a permanent change as far as I am concerned.”

“That would be a question for a future Minister. You can call them back whenever that is the case.”

“That would be a conversation for future holders of the role to raise.”

“I would hope that I can show, by what I do as chair of the board, the value that it adds by having a Minister who is not only engaged with the ministerial hat on but also directly through the board.”

“Even with my ministerial hat on, before we get to the question of being chair of the board, I am routinely involved in making sure that things are delivered, not just seeing Jim Harra once every few weeks and having an update. I meet other members of HMRC, not only the executive committee, the commissioners—”

“—but also people throughout the organisation, right down to people who are managing individual programmes on the frontline to go through with them exactly what is going on: “Are there any issues? Are there any you want to surface now? Is there anything I can do to help deliver this?” Even with my ministerial hat on, I …”

“The non-executive directors are an absolutely fantastic asset in HMRC, not just Jayne-Anne Gadhia, who we have spoken about already, but some of the new NEDs who we have recruited on a temporary basis pending the full recruitment. I do not want to single out individual people, but there are people, who you will know if…”

“It makes sure that it is linked up. There is no need to have another meeting to update me on what the board said. I get to see first hand the board’s reaction and its suggestions, and to input where appropriate. They can ask me questions, because it is right for them to talk to me.”

“No.”

“I would start by saying that the individual officials I have met who work at HMRC are fantastic. There is an amazing dedication and an amazing amount of expertise and determination to do their job absolutely as well as they can.”

“The role that I can add to that and what is helpful, I hope, by me being involved is to make sure that, as an organisation, we can transform and take some risks as well, maybe get outside of a comfort zone and say, “Actually, we need to do things slightly differently. We need to test and learn a bit more. We need to wo…”

“Any tax advisers who interact with HMRC will have to be registered.”

“There you go. You know them as well as I do, John Glen. Thank you for endorsing those. The customer services one is a good example where you have people who work in customer services who know their stuff inside out. When the organisation is trying to make sure they are hitting the key metrics at the moment in terms of …”

“To start with customer service, it is a good one to be specific on. I want to see the number of people who are using the digital services and are confident to do so increase. We will be setting out plans for that in due course about what we expect to hit. Part of the process of making sure HMRC is and remains a digital…”

“The pace has been on quite a long timescale. It tends to be quite a large programme.”

“It is not necessarily too slow. Sorry, there are two different points to be made here. One is about speed of delivery. With any programme, you need to make sure it is being delivered at a good pace, and that is the case for large programmes as well, but I have also found that there are some more small changes. There ar…”

“Maybe you and I have different styles of being Ministers, John Glen, but my preference in terms of delivering change is following through on making sure it is delivered throughout the organisation. I do not think that writing a letter and getting a response will cut it for me. I want to make sure that we are doing this…”

“No, of course that is not what I am saying. I am saying that, as a Minister who wants to be involved in delivering that change, I want to work with the excellent people who are employed by HMRC to give my direction, provide my challenge, offer my support to push that change and work with people across the organisation …”