A PLEASANT CHAT WITH HMRC, TECHNOLOGY PERMITTING

So we have hit the year sliding, some of us even managed to get to the office. There is no denying the fact that the UK is not up to it when it comes to dealing with snow, something which the FSB is calling for a major national conference to have a look at. I take full responsibility for having a rear wheel drive car and if it was not for the fact that my broadband connection was a thousand times faster snow and ice or not, I would not have been able to carry on working relatively effectively. Business has taken another battering, but have we learned any lessons?

Broadband connectivity is critical, at the right speed and the right price. We have only have to look at Finland to see the investment that country is putting into its communications infrastructure – why should Kent be any less endowed? One of the vital points here is the expense and the contention ratios. It is all very well to say you can have the speed, but if you are buying through a national provider – or getting it for free, then the price of the overall package may just be acceptable, but is the service. In a situation like this we have to look at the contention ratios – how many people are sharing the same connection at the same time as you are? My question has been, and remains, what can KCC do to help here? Several years ago, on the Kent Broadband Committee), we haggled with BT over opening up access; now years later we have not kept up the pressure and looked forward sufficiently at the new superfast capabilities or the spare capacities that can be found in our schools and other public institutions that could possibly be sold on. We have been talking, but frankly it has been offline for some time. One excuse has been that it may contravene State Aid regulations, but please, someone must have the wit somewhere to find a solution.

The broadband link brings me nicely into the comment about the HMRC. Small businesses are being firmly pushed along the online route. Financial encouragement, extra time to complete returns you name it. But it still hinges around the quality and consistency of the service we get. In endeavouring to complete the company’s first online VAT return I ended up not knowing whether I had successes or not. It was only when I got “The Letter” through the post I knew something had gone wrong. Putting that on hold for the moment, a few days ago I also had to talk to HMRC to clarify the payroll returns, and on both of these occasions I was taken aback at the helpfulness and indeed friendliness of the person at the other end of the line. I can only hope that this has been at the result of some focussed training and that someone somewhere has at last come to the realisation that businesses should not automatically be treated as crooks and that human error, when under the considerable pressure of running one’s own business, can happen.  

This entry was posted on 14/02/2010 at 01:53 pm and is filed under Uncategorised. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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