New strategic focus for Customs
Richard Broadbent, the man appointed to head wide-ranging reorganisation at Customs & Excise, has pushed reforms further by rearranging the department into two core business units.
Under the heading ‘Business Services and Taxes, and Law Enforcement’, the changes signal Broadbent is still intent on profound structural reform to improve the work of Customs.
The latest set of changes follows hard on the heels of one of Broadbent’s earliest changes on becoming chairman of Customs – cutting the number of board members from 11 to seven.
He recently told a Commons select committee that he did not believe that ‘accountabilities and responsibilities were clear cut,’ when he first took up his post.
As the latest changes were made public Broadbent said that Customs could not go making incremental improvements through making current services work better. The department was in need of more radical reform.
‘Reorganising structure in itself achieves little. But it does provide the potential for the organisation to become more strategically driven, more able to drive strategies into action and more flexible and responsive to external events and customer requirements,’ he said.
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