Tear Down Ty Glas

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Fersiwn Cymraeg i ddilyn

Cardiff’s skyscraper tax office must go says think tank

A Cardiff-based think tank is calling for Ty Glas, HM Revenue & Customs’ skyscraper office complex which dominates the city’s Llanishen suburb, to be demolished.

However, stressed the Cardiff Policy Forum, this is no tax rebellion. CPF wants the 16-storey, `asbestos-ridden, carbon-spewing dinosaur’, home to some 3,000 civil servants, replaced by several state-of-the-art, human and environment-friendly offices situated throughout the Valleys and South Wales. The think tank also wants HMRC’s smaller city-centre based building, Portcullis House, and the tax offices in Newport, Bridgend and Pontypool to be saved from rumoured closure.


The recently formed Revenue & Customs department, explains CPF director Owen Davies, has been told by The Treasury to cut 12,500 jobs by 2008. Many have already gone and as a result it is reorganising its estate to accommodate the smaller workforce. Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland is the last of five regional reviews the department is conducting.

`Our proposal,’ said Davies, `straddles two events: the government’s announcement of a new Climate Change Bill and the beginning of HMRC’s review of its estate in Wales. The review begins in April. In June HMRC will consult with staff and other interested parties on its draft proposals and from August spend twenty weeks working out how to realise these proposals by 2010.

`Each region is split into urban centres, clusters or individual locations. Cardiff is classified as an urban centre consisting of Cardiff, Newport, Barry, and Pontypridd. Bridgend office is classified as `individual’ but linked with Pontypridd so it is not clear if its 52 workers are included in the Cardiff urban centre figures of 3,311 which HMRC proposes to reduce to 3,000 by 2008.

`CPF’s proposal,’ says Davies `is to demolish Ty Glas, keep the 300 or so staff in Portcullis House so that HMRC retains an important presence in the Welsh capital. Expand the Newport office to around 250-300 to include contact centres. Expand the Bridgend and Pontypool offices to a similar size and build seven or eight brand new, beautifully designed, carbon neutral offices to accommodate up to 300 workers in towns throughout the Valleys. Brecon, which has been designated `individual’ and earmarked for virtual closure, could be included in the process provided no extra jobs were lost.

`We hope that whilst HMRC is drawing up its proposal and during the period of consultation that the Welsh Assembly Government, Assembly Members and all other stakeholders will press the department and the Westminster government to take serious cognisance of these proposals. Previous regional outcomes, consultation or no consultation, have all followed a depressingly familiar formula: close all the small offices and pile everybody into the remaining large ones. We hope that will not be the case this time and that more general concerns and wider interests will be addressed.

`These new offices must be built near existing housing stock, as opposed to Business Parks, so that the workforce has at least the option or opportunity in the future of walking to work. Valleys towns could tender for them. I’m sure people in South Wales would prefer the prospect of their children working in a tax office than a Super Casino.

`This is a golden opportunity. Ty Glas’s shelf-life as a viable building will soon be up and with modern internet and intranet facilities there is no need for everybody to be packed into the one building in some futile `economy-of-scale’ exercise. Government departments must take the lead and not just look at the bottom line but consider their social obligations too. The Welsh Assembly Government has a policy of decentralising government and HMRC in Wales should mirror that policy.

`It is important that Cardiff benefits from this policy. Most of the Ty Glas workforce drives in from the Valleys anyway so economically it won’t lose out. However, the easing of pollution and congestion in Cardiff bought about by 3,000 people not converging and leaving the same spot everyday will be a huge relief. Where Ty Glas now stands, to consolidate these benefits, a woodland park should be planted. An additional benefit of this will be to make the adjacent Cardiff Business Park a more attractive proposition.

`Finally’, concludes Jones, `HMRC’s national estate is owned and managed by Mapeley which is very much a `bottom-line’ company and whilst both talk the environmental talk they certainly do not walk the walk. Recycling of any kind, for instance, is a completely hit and miss affair. With this policy HMRC’s Welsh estate would be owned by a semi-autonomous Assembly agency charged with managing it in a sustainable way. It would develop the knowledge needed to manage a geographically diverse estate and pass it on to other government departments. Part of its remit would be to attract more government jobs to Wales on a similar basis.

`The project should, ultimately, be self-financing all things considered. However, any initial additional costs would be money well spent and CPF would be happy to offer our services as go-betweens in any consultation process involving all potential stakeholders from the Assembly to Westminster, HMRC and the unions and local authorities.

`When you set a bureaucrat a target,’ concludes Davies, `he will reach it no matter what but it can be like asking a man with a JCB to dig your kitchen garden. The effect is never quite what you were looking for. We want to help politicians, government departments, charities and businesses avoid this trap. Help them get from A to B so that when they arrive at B they still think the journey was worthwhile and the B they’ve arrived at is actually B+. We can do this because we are in a position to look at the bigger picture.’
26 March 2007