HMRC Call Waiting Times and Letter Response Times

 

I asked Claude to present me with the statistics about HMRC's customer service standards over the last 5 years wrt call answering times and letter response times.

Here is its response: 

"Here's the trend for HMRC's two biggest phone lines over the last five years. Both got dramatically worse until 2022-24, then started improving — though not at the same pace.

 

Call answer times (minutes:seconds)

Year	Self Assessment helpline	Employers helpline
2020-21	15:12	09:07
2021-22	17:07	12:03
2022-23	25:14	16:03
2023-24	37:15	22:20
2024-25	23:40	26:32

The Self Assessment line peaked at over 37 minutes in 2023-24 (the year the Public Accounts Committee accused HMRC of deliberately degrading phone service to push people online) before improving to 23:40 in 2024-25. The Employers line went the other way — it kept getting worse into 2024-25, largely because of industrial action from December 2024 to June 2025. Overall call-answering rate (percentage of adviser attempts handled) was 71.5% in 2024-25 against an 85% target; it's since climbed to around 83–84% for April–September 2025.

Letter/correspondence response times (% answered within 15 working days, target 80%)

Year	% within 15 days
2020-21	Below target (pandemic-era decline)
2021-22	45.5%
2022-23	73%
2023-24	76%
2024-25	76.9%
Q1 2025-26 (Apr–Jun)	69.5% (dip — staff pulled onto phones for the Self Assessment peak)
Q2 2025-26 (Jul–Sep)	78.9%, improving to 87% by quarter end

Post has consistently missed its 80% target every year for the last five years. The lowest point was 2021-22, during the pandemic backlog, when fewer than half of letters got a reply within 15 days.

The bigger picture: the National Audit Office found taxpayers collectively spent 798 years on hold in 2022-23 and 558 years in 2024-25 — an improvement, but still enormous. HMRC received £51m in extra funding in May 2024 and a further £500m from the 2025 Spending Review, aimed at getting 90% of customer interactions to self-service/digital channels by 2029-30 (currently around 70-80%, depending on the quarter). Both call answering and 15-day correspondence figures remain below HMRC's own targets as of the latest published data (Q2 2025-26)."

I queried the letter response figures: 

"Good instinct to question that — the "% within 15 working days" figure hides a lot. Let me dig into the actual average/median wait, not just the target-hit rate.You're right to push on that — and the "76.9% within 15 days" headline is misleading in an important way.

That statistic is a blended figure across simple correspondence — the bulk of what HMRC receives is straightforward stuff (change of address, simple claims, acknowledgements) that genuinely can be turned around fast. It's not representative of complex cases.

For anything more involved, the picture is very different:

• HMRC runs an official "check when you can expect a reply" tool that individuals can use to see expected wait times for specific types of query. One RSM UK review found the tool showing a response time of 203 days (29 weeks) for online applications and letters requesting repayment, and 147 days (21 weeks) for paper returns.
• Accountants and agents routinely report enquiry cases, complex repayment disputes, and non-standard correspondence taking 3–10+ months, based on forum and professional-body accounts — well beyond the "average" 15-day figure.
• HMRC's own internal guidance sets separate targets for dealing with correspondence within both 15 and 40 working days, and instructs staff to send an interim acknowledgement — rather than a full reply — when the 15-day target can't be met. That acknowledgement can itself count toward "responding," while the substantive reply comes much later.

So the two things you've heard are both true and not really in conflict: the headline stat (which drives the target) covers the mass of simple, quickly-resolved post; the "several months" experience is what happens once your letter falls into a queue for anything requiring actual casework — enquiries, disputes, complex repayments. 

HMRC doesn't publish a clean average/median turnaround time across all correspondence types in its regular statistics, which is part of why the gap between the headline % and lived experience is so wide. If you want, I can dig further into whether there's a published median/mean figure (rather than just % hitting the 15-day target) for a specific type of correspondence you're dealing with."

 

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HMRC To Bin Letters

 

In a bid to slash print and postage costs by £50m and drag HMRC communications into the 21st century, letters will no longer be sent out automatically to taxpayers from next spring. Email alerts will be sent to them, notifying them of new documents in their personal tax accounts or the HMRC app instead. 

As part of HMRC’s ambitious digital by default programme, which envisages 90% of HMRC interactions with taxpayers being online or digital only by 2029-30 tax year, the Budget papers confirmed a major shift to digital by default had been signed off by the government, which is starting sooner than expected.

This means that the days of posted brown letters from HMRC are very much numbered with only the ‘digitally excluded’ or those who actively opt out of digital still able to receive old school posted letters, starting in spring 2026.

In one sense this might be an improvement, given that snail mail comms with HMRC seems to take a year or so. However, those who are not digitally savvy may well face problems with this new high tech vision of HMRC's. 

In June I warned of the bureaucratic nightmare that HMRC's rush to digital will unleash. 

HMRC’s MTD is a self-inflicted wound on the UK’s entrepreneurial spirit, and taxpayers are the ones left bleeding.

Various guides to Making Tax Digital can be found here. 

HMRC Is Shite (www.hmrcisshite.com), also available via the domain www.hmrconline.com, is brought to you by www.kenfrost.com "The Living Brand"

HMRC Will Take Seven Months to Read My Letter – No, This Isn’t a Joke, It’s Real

Imagine mailing a letter to HMRC—His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs, Britain’s tax enforcers—and being told it’ll take seven months for them to even read it. Sounds like a bad punchline, right? Except it’s not. This is straight from a jaw-dropping report in The Telegraph on January 29, 2025, by James Titcomb, exposing just how deep HMRC’s dysfunction runs. Seven months! I could master origami, watch every Sherlock episode twice, or lose all memory of why I bothered writing them—and they still wouldn’t have peeked at my envelope.

 

This isn’t some wild exaggeration; it’s the grim reality taxpayers are facing. According to The Telegraph, HMRC admitted it’ll take half a year just to read a letter—not process it, not reply, just give it a glance. Meanwhile, miss your tax deadline by a heartbeat, and they’ll slap you with fines quicker than you can blink. But when it’s their turn to move? They’re apparently too busy perfecting the art of procrastination to lift a finger.

 

Let’s break it down with the facts The Telegraph dug up. HMRC hauled in nearly £700 million in tax revenue last year—our money, mind you. Yet they can’t hire enough staff to open the mail before it’s practically an antique? The report says some taxpayers are waiting so long for refunds they’re dying before the cash arrives. Dead. Before a cheque clears. That’s not a glitch; that’s a scandal plucked straight from a dystopian novel, except it’s playing out in real life.

 

And if you think phoning them is any better, brace yourself. The Telegraph clocked an average wait time of 47 days to speak to someone. Forty-seven days! I could hitchhike to their office and camp out sooner—assuming they hadn’t shuttered most of their walk-in centres already. Their big fix? “Go online,” they say. Great advice, unless you’re Steve from Buckinghamshire, who told The Telegraph he spent months wrestling their glitchy website to no avail. Not everyone’s a digital wizard, and even if you are, why should you have to play tech support just to get what’s owed?

 

This isn’t some urban legend—it’s a documented mess. The Telegraph laid it bare: refunds stalled so long they’re posthumous, businesses choking on VAT delays, and people like me wondering if our letters are just landfill fodder. HMRC’s excuse? They’re “busy.” Busy with what? Counting our £700 million while we rot on hold? With that kind of revenue, they’ve got no business acting like they’re strapped for cash. This is apathy in a suit, and The Telegraph caught them red-handed.

 

The double standard is nauseating. They’ll chase you down like bounty hunters if you’re late, but when they owe you—or just owe you a shred of service—they’re suddenly moving at the speed of a glacier. The Telegraph didn’t make this up; it’s the lived nightmare of taxpayers across the UK. I’m not letting it slide. I want my letter read. I want my refund before I’m collecting a pension. And I want HMRC to stop treating us like annoyances they can ignore until we give up.

 

So, HMRC, here’s a wake-up call: do your damn job. Open the mail. Pick up the phone. Stop acting like seven months to read a letter—confirmed by The Telegraph as your actual policy—is remotely acceptable. Because this isn’t a rumour or a rant; it’s a disgrace, splashed across a national newspaper for all to see. If you can’t handle our £700 million better than this, maybe it’s time we find someone who can.

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Tax does have to be taxing.

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