HMRC left callers waiting 23 minutes on average as MPs condemn ‘digital by default’ push

HM Revenue and Customs kept taxpayers on hold for an average of 23 minutes and 40 seconds between January and June this year, and 1.2 million callers hung up or were cut off before speaking to anyone, according to a scathing report from the Commons public accounts committee published on Monday.

The committee found that the department had cut 1,900 customer service posts since 2023 on the assumption that online services and an artificial intelligence assistant would absorb the demand. Instead, the number of calls fell by only 6% while the proportion answered within 10 minutes dropped from 71% to 48%. In the worst week, in late January, the average wait was 41 minutes.

“HMRC has decided that the taxpayer must come to it, on its terms, through its app,” the committee’s chair said. “For most people that is fine. For a 78-year-old widow trying to understand why her tax code has changed, it is a wall. The department is designing those people out of the system and calling it efficiency.”

Margaret Oyelowo, 74, from Dudley, told the committee she had spent a total of four hours and 15 minutes on hold over three days in February trying to correct a £640 overpayment demand. “I was told to use the app. I do not have a smartphone. I was told to use the website. The website told me to ring,” she said. “In the end my granddaughter did it on her phone in about 12 minutes, which rather proves their point and mine at the same time.”

The report also criticised the department’s target of handling 80% of contact digitally by 2028, which it said had been set “without any assessment of who the remaining 20% are”. The Fair Tax Helpline, a charity that helps people on low incomes with their affairs, said its own caseload had risen by a third in a year. “We have become the human front door that HMRC removed,” said its director, Graham Lister. “A charity with nine staff should not be propping up a department with 60,000.”

HMRC said that it had recruited 1,200 additional advisers since April and that average waits had fallen to 16 minutes in September. It said the digital assistant now resolved 2.1 million queries a month without a call being needed. “We recognise that performance in the first half of the year was not good enough,” a spokesperson said. “The improvement since then is real and it is continuing.”

The committee has asked the department to publish monthly call-handling figures broken down by the age of the caller, and to guarantee a dedicated line, with a maximum wait of 10 minutes, for people over 70 and those with disabilities. HMRC has until December to respond.