HEREFORD Tax Office has the numbers, now they’ve got to add up. The county’s two MPs took the team’s fight for survival to Whitehall – with nearly 4,000 people signed up to the cause.

Paul Keetch and Bill Wiggin made their “big push” at a meeting on Tuesday and seem to have squeezed enough breathing space out of revenue and customs bosses to keep long-term hopes for the Broadway House base alive.

At the meeting, it was made clear the revenue was looking to keep “a presence of some kind” in the city, said Mr Keetch.

“We need to maximise what this presence will be. Right now there will be no involuntary redundancies at Broadway House and the process is likely to take several years,” he said.

The MPs scored points suggesting that Broadway House could be a local base for several government departments.

Around 1,000 of the names on the petition were gathered at an all-party stand in High Town, Hereford, last Saturday.

Broadway House and its 100 revenue and customs jobs could go under government cost-cutting plans. HM Revenue and Customs wants to close a number of regional offices, leaving the Hereford staff with no-where they could reasonably locate to.

The staff themselves put together a report of their own, showing how the Broad Street office could stay open with reduced costs and better service.