Watchdog accuses HMRC of deliberately ‘degrading’ phone services

Parliament’s spending watchdog has accused HM Revenue & Customs of deliberately running down its phone services to force people to go online after finding the average call waiting time has passed 23 minutes – almost double the figure of two years earlier.

With people across the country working to finish their self-assessment return before the 31 January deadline, the public accounts committee (PAC) said it was “concerned that HMRC has degraded its own phone services” in the hope that taxpayers choose other ways to get in touch.

MPs on the cross-party body said such treatment “has damaged trust in the tax system”, but HMRC hit back at the suggestion it had deliberately made its customer service worse, calling it a “completely baseless” accusation.

In an unusually hard-hitting report, the PAC said after the “all-time low” of the previous year, the tax department’s customer service had gone on to plumb new depths in 2023-24 and needed to take responsibility for how it had failed its customers.

It said that in the first 11 months of that tax year, HMRC cut off 43,690 customers who had been waiting for 1 hour and 10 minutes to speak to an adviser – a 535% increase on the 6,875 who had their calls terminated after waiting that long in 2022-23.

The PAC and Whitehall spending watchdog the National Audit Office both issued scathing reports about HMRC’s customer service last year, but in its latest report, the committee of MPs said its “already poor service to taxpayers has become even worse” since then.

As the taxpayer population increases along with the complexity of their financial affairs, HMRC has seemingly struggled to cope with demand – meaning users have regularly encountered long call-waiting times.

The department is trying to cope by weaning people off speaking to a real person on the phone and encouraging them to turn to its digital services first, on the grounds that many queries can be resolved quickly and easily online. These services range from online tax accounts and an app to YouTube videos and chatbots.

In 2023–24, HMRC answered 66.4% of customers’ attempts to speak to an adviser, against a target of 85%. Average call waiting times exceeded 23 minutes – up from just over 16 minutes the previous year and a little over 12 minutes in 2021-22. In 2018-19 it was about five minutes.

HMRC’s chief executive, Jim Harra, said: “The committee’s claims about our customer service are completely baseless. In reality we’ve made huge improvements to our service standards, with call wait times down by 17 minutes since April last year.”

HMRC said its latest figures showed average waiting times down to about 11 minutes, compared with about 28 minutes the previous April.

“We will always be there to answer the phone for those who need extra help. At the same time, more than 80% of customers are satisfied with our digital services, with more and more people using them to quickly and easily manage their tax affairs,” said Harra.