HMRC’s Whitehall HQ Barely a Fifth Full on Fridays – While They Demand You File On Time And Answer Every Letter
Whilst we are still stuck in the real world of Monday-to-Friday graft answering HMRC’s endless demands, their own staff treat Fridays like a national holiday.
New figures obtained by Guido Fawkes’ FOI Unit reveal the glorious reality of HMRC’s flagship headquarters at 100 Parliament Street. On working Fridays between April 2025 and March 2026, the place was barely a fifth full. Average Monday-to-Thursday attendance was 358 people. On Fridays it plunged roughly 43% lower. The best Friday of the entire year managed just 264 bodies — still well below a normal weekday.
HMRC helpfully reduced desk capacity from 516 to 391 in 2025. Even with fewer desks, Monday-to-Thursday attendance averaged a respectable 89%. Fridays? A pathetic 50%. Half the desks empty. Taxmen sticking their feet up, doing the laundry, or working from the sofa while the rest of us keep the economy going.
And yet the official line remains pure gold: “We expect all office-based colleagues to spend at least 60% of their working time in an HMRC office.” Hybrid working, they claim, helps them “attract and retain the talent we need to deliver for our customers.”
Deliver for customers?
The same customers who wait an hour on hold, get hung up on deadline day, wait years for refunds, and face quarterly MTD reporting while HMRC’s own office stands half-empty every Friday?
This is the department that lectures the self-employed about digital record-keeping, demands perfect compliance, and sends debt collectors after pensioners for £47. Meanwhile their own staff treat Fridays as optional and the building looks like a ghost town.
Four-day week creeping in by the back door? Looks that way. Just don’t expect any four-day week for the rest of us when the next brown envelope arrives.
Tax does have to be taxing.
But when HMRC’s own flagship HQ is barely a fifth full on Fridays while they insist on 60% attendance and still can’t deliver basic service? That’s not taxing — that’s institutional hypocrisy with empty desks as the evidence.
Work from home on Fridays by all means, lads. Just stop pretending you’re delivering world-class customer service while the lights are off.
