HMRC cut off 44,000 callers who had waited more than an hour, and MPs concluded it was a choice

In 2023-24 HMRC answered 66.4% of customers’ attempts to speak to an adviser, against a target of 85%, and average waiting times to get through exceeded 23 minutes.

During the first eleven months of that year the department cut off nearly 44,000 callers who had already been waiting for 70 minutes. These were not people who gave up and hung up. They were people the system disconnected after more than an hour on hold.

The finding that turned this into a scandal

The Public Accounts Committee did not treat the figures as a resourcing failure. It concluded that HMRC had been too willing to let its telephone services fail in the hope that this would force people to use its digital services instead.

Degrading a public service on purpose in order to change public behaviour is a policy. It was simply never announced as one.

The committee also questioned HMRC’s claims about the quality of the digital alternative, noting that the difficulty taxpayers faced getting through by telephone gave them reason to doubt that the replacement was as good as the department maintained.

Who this falls on

People with straightforward tax affairs rarely need to telephone HMRC at all. The callers are overwhelmingly people with something wrong, including an incorrect tax code, a disputed penalty, a Self Assessment problem, a bereavement to report or a business in difficulty. Those are precisely the cases that digital self-service handles worst.

The penalty and interest regimes continue to run while a taxpayer is unable to get through. Interest accrues, deadlines pass, and the department’s failure to answer the telephone does not pause anybody’s liability.

The £39.8bn in the background

Over the same period the tax gap, meaning the difference between tax that should be paid and tax actually collected, was estimated at £39.8bn for 2022-23, up from £38.1bn the year before.

The committee pressed HMRC to be bolder in tackling abuse of the tax system, to investigate more cases of criminality and to bring prosecutions where appropriate. Those two facts belong side by side: an unanswered telephone for ordinary taxpayers at one end, and roughly forty billion pounds a year going uncollected at the other.

If you cannot get through

Put everything in writing and keep proof of postage, because a written record survives a dropped call and a call log does not. Note the date, time and duration of every attempt, since that evidence supports both a formal complaint and a reasonable excuse argument against a late filing penalty. Complaints go through HMRC’s own process first, then to the Adjudicator’s Office, and then via your MP to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman. TaxAid and Tax Help for Older People both provide free advice if you are on a low income.