Revealed: 80 million calls to HMRC go unanswered as Lib Dems demand urgent action to fix tax helpline chaos
Research by the House of Commons Library commissioned by the Liberal Democrats shows HMRC has failed to pick up one in five taxpayer calls over the last decade, with the tax service leaving almost a hundred million calls unanswered in ten years.
Bombshell new analysis by the Liberal Democrats has revealed over 80 million calls to HMRC have gone unanswered, as the party calls for urgent investment in HMRC customer services and reforms to drastically improve response times.
The Liberal Democrats have castigated the previous Conservative Government for driving HMRC customer services into the ground, warning that the current Labour Government is failing to deliver a “decent service” to taxpayers. Last year saw the second-longest average waiting time in the last decade.
Research by the House of Commons Library shows that HMRC has failed to pick up 83 million calls from Brits in the last ten years, with 6 million of those being in just the last year. Analysis shows 17,700 calls a day went unanswered. Rates of successful pickup were as low as 72.5 per cent as recently as 2022/23, with the latest figures for 2024/25 showing that one in five callers did not get through to the tax service.
The average waiting time for calls to the tax service in 2024/25 was a painful 18 minutes and 38 seconds, the second highest in the last decade after the 23 minutes and 14 seconds recorded in 2023/24.
The analysis comes after it was confirmed last week that the state pension will rise by 4.8 per cent under the triple lock, taking the full new state pension to £12,547.70 from next April. This means retirees whose only income is the new state pension will be just £22.30 a year away from having to pay income tax for the first time, after the Conservative Party froze the tax-free personal allowance at £12,570 until 2028.
The Liberal Democrats are warning that millions of people risk being shut out of the support they need if HMRC cannot get a grip on its customer service failures. Working people, the self-employed, farmers and small business owners face the greatest frustration, unable to spend hours on hold during office hours to resolve urgent tax or payroll issues.
The party is calling on the Government to deliver a comprehensive plan to reduce call waiting times, boost staffing levels and modernise the system so that taxpayers, from pensioners to young workers and business owners, can access help quickly and fairly.
Commenting, Welsh Liberal Democrat Westminster Spokesperson David Chadwick MP said:
“Self-employed traders trying to make sense of tax rules, young people battling the logistics of their first job, and small business owners trying to get payday right are being hung up on by the very people whose help they need.
“It is simply disgraceful to think that those people have not been able to access the decent service they deserve from HMRC, all because the previous Conservative Government drove the agency into the ground and the current Labour Government has so far failed to turn things around.
“People are already struggling with the cost of food and heating their homes. They do not need ‘try the taxman again’ on their to-do lists. The Government must take urgent action to fix HMRC’s shocking wait times and finally deliver a tax service fit for the public.”
ENDS