Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what the average amount of time is for a person to receive a response from HMRC caseworkers for queries on (a) inheritance tax payments and (b) other subjects; and whether his Department has any target times for such responses to be sent.

HMRC aims to respond to 80% of correspondence within 15 working days and answer telephone calls within an average time of 5 minutes.

Since 6 April 2018, 95.65% of new Inheritance Tax accounts submitted to HMRC are processed within 15 working days. This enables the customer to obtain Grant of Representation.

If compliance checks are required, then HMRC will write to the customer and provide them with a timeline and a date indicating how long the checks will take.

For the week ending 31 August 2018, HMRC responded to 66.38% of inheritance tax post within 15 working days. We answered the phone within an average of 5 minutes