Dundee has been dealt an “absolute hammer blow” with hundreds of jobs at risk as part of an HMRC cost-cutting exercise, it was claimed last night.
Around 130 jobs at Caledonian House are likely to be axed while bosses “can’t make any promises” about the future of 650 staff based at Sidlaw House who officials plan to redeploy to the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
Two new regional centres will be created in Glasgow and Edinburgh by 2019-20 under the controversial UK Government shake-up, which aims to save £100 million a year by 2025.
Caledonian House is scheduled to shut by 2017-18, one of the earliest closures in the country. HMRC’s second Permanent Secretary told The Courier there was no guarantee the Sidlaw’s full workforce would be needed in the switch to the DWP.
Edward Troup said: “This is a process which is going to take several years, although Dundee we are going to close early in 2018, we want to talk to them on a one-to-one basis, see what they want to do, see how we can help them and, yes, we do expect there to be exit packages for whom there is no future in the organisation.
“Dundee has two sites. There are about 130 or so who work in tax and are clearly outside reasonable daily travel (to Edinburgh or Glasgow).
“There are around 600 or so who are working on tax credits. That work will transfer across to DWP and the relevant staff will transfer, their work will transfer.”
Asked if he could guarantee all of Sidlaw’s workers would keep their jobs, he replied: “That’s what we would hope but we can’t make any promises simply because this is partly in the hands of DWP and it’s partly at an uncertain date in the future.”
First Minister Nicola Sturgeon told MSPs she was seeking urgent talks with UK ministers as the changes “put significant numbers of jobs in Scotland at risk”.
Dundee City West SNP MSP Joe FitzPatrick called the decision a “hammer blow for the city”.
Jenny Marra, the Dundee-based Labour MSP, said it was “devastating for the workers and for our community”.
Local MPs Chris Law and Stewart Hosie visited the building to offer support to staff following the news.