I’ve not had many dealings with my local council in the past year (apart from the same question I keep asking them which they ignore ). However, because I am now self-employed I am having more and more dealings with central government particularly around tax and VAT. These are mind numbingly complicated, obtuse and written in a language which makes most computer manuals read like Agatha Christie .

There are not only leaflets on some of this stuff - for VAT there is an actual book that the hapless person has to try and read and digest. To try and change my VAT registration I am filling in a huge form, most of which I do not understand. Why the complication? Is there going to be any circumstance where someone else is going to pay my VAT for me??

But - in this cloud a silver lining. I am now getting regular correspondence from the Inland Revenue - it’s the same forms, which I’ve already completed, but I now look forward to receiving them on a weekly basis. I must be stuck in some automatic mailing queue. And better still, I got a letter today saying that my current tax account is in credit for quite a large sum of money . This is fantastic news, oh, but if it were true.

I have to say, that all the people I’ve spoken to at Inland Revenue and Customs and Excise have been very helpful - unlike the letters and forms which I get sent which are complicated and confused and quite often blunt to the point of being mildly offensive. And unlike the troll at passport control in Paris yesterday when I boarded the Eurostar. When I asked why I had to go through immigration as I am a British Citizen he replied as rudely as he could ‘well you have to prove it’. Prove it? How?? Cricket test stuff?

I stitch all these minor ancedotes together because taken as a whole they suggest to me that central government in the UK has got further to go than local government in ‘transforming services’. It might also explain why according to this article in the

Guardian Online yesterday the UK is 10th in a global table, while Canada is 1st.

Ask the citizens? Well if anyone was to bother to ask me I would say that a considerable amount of the language and content surrounding taxes could be radically overhauled to make it comprehensible - and that a bit of customer care wouldn’t go amiss in the immigration service.