The Financial Secretary to the Treasury (Nigel Huddleston)
His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs plays a crucial role in collecting revenue to fund our vital public services. The Department’s strategy is to become a ‘digital first’ tax administration. This involves helping customers move to online services, with the aim of making services easier for customers, and of allowing HMRC to operate more efficiently.
Last year HMRC received over 3 million calls on just three things that can easily be done: resetting an online password, getting a tax code, and getting a national insurance number. Shifting customer contact such as this to online interactions is helping to, and will continue to help, reduce demand on phone lines and allow HMRC to prioritise calls for those who really need to speak to an adviser. This is a fine example of a tangible way to improve public sector productivity.
This digital first strategy is the correct long-term vision for tax administration. In support of this, the Chancellor invested over £136 million in the 2021 spending review to enable HMRC to enhance its digital services. HMRC received a £900 million cash increase over this Parliament, from £4.3 billion in 2019-20 to £5.2 billion in 2024-25.
However, the Government are clear that while HMRC continues to make this digital transition, customers deserve a reliable and responsive service on traditional contact methods, such as the phone lines. Therefore today the Government are providing HMRC with £51 million in new funding to bring HMRC’s phoneline service back up to the published target of 85% of calls to HMRC advisers being answered.
Today’s additional funding enables HMRC to meet the performance standards on its phone lines that its customers expect, while continuing the transition to a digital first model of tax administration. The Government are fully committed to providing HMRC with the resources it needs to meet the needs of all its customers, and will continue to do so.
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