Jim Harra, the chief executive of HMRC, told MPs that had the shake-up gone ahead, it would have boosted support for vulnerable and digitally excluded customers
The boss of HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) has claimed that services have been hit after plans for a helpline overhaul were put on ice.
Jim Harra, the chief executive, told MPs that had the shake-up gone ahead, it would have boosted support for vulnerable and digitally excluded customers. The proposed changes, announced on March 19, would have seen the self-assessment helpline shut during part of the year.
However, following a backlash from tax experts, small businesses, and other organisations, HMRC scrapped the plans on March 20. Under the shelved scheme, from April to September, the self-assessment helpline would have been closed, pushing customers to use online services instead.
Mr Harra revealed to the Treasury Committee that the U-turn was prompted by an unexpected “strength of feeling” from stakeholders. He explained: “Ministers certainly expressed their concern about the strength of the reaction and about the fact that the reaction was not just a, it wasn’t just a political reaction, it was actually a genuine concern about how’s this all going to work.”
“And we quickly agreed that the right thing to do was not to proceed with this and to listen to these concerns and to make sure that we have either addressed them or if we haven’t that we take them on board and re-plan and so that’s why we decided not to proceed.”
Revealing HMRCs ongoing investments in digital services and the encouragement of customers to use them as their first point of contact, it was indicated that helplines would remain unchanged and open as usual.
Discussing the repercussions of shelving the changes which were announced on March 19th, Mr Harra said: “The key pressure point is in our helpline service, where we are giving a service to customers well below the service standard that we want to give them, whether that be wait times or whether that be the proportion of calls that succeed in getting answered by an adviser.”
“And today, a lower proportion of those calls is being answered than would have been the case if we’d been able to implement these changes. Because customers who we would have deflected to the online services are today going through to those helplines.”
Mr Harra said the necessity for HMRC is to return services back to their highest possible standard. Describing his interactions with ministers as positive and constructive, Mr Harra revealed optimism for future progression.
In light of concerns over worsening conditions, Mr Harra said: “Certainly in the short term I think that we are in for a very difficult first quarter. I would hope that going into the second quarter that we will be able to make improvements with additional resources as well as continuing to push our digital first strategy at every opportunity.”
He further explained: “I think there’s little doubt that if we had been able to proceed, the evidence from last year’s trials indicates that we would have been able to help more vulnerable and digitally excluded customers because the route through to an adviser for them would not have been blocked by other callers whose calls could have been more effectively dealt with online.”
Bringing attention to future approaches, Mr Harra highlighted that there are “lessons for the department in how we engage with stakeholders”.
Speaking earlier about the announcement made on March 19, Mr Harra said: “HMRC decided that we thought it was a good idea to do this based on the results of the trial last year, but that was shared with ministers.”
Asked if they knew the date, he said: “Yes.” Asked who the stakeholders were who caused the decision to be reversed on March 20, he said: “We got an immediate reaction from a range of stakeholders, including tax professional bodies, that expressed concern that despite the trials last year and despite the evaluations of those, that we were moving too fast.
“And that they did not have the assurance they needed that we would be able to provide services for example to those customers who could not do things online. And we concluded that the best thing to do would be to stop the changes that we had announced.”
When questioned if he had consulted with external stakeholders before March 19, Mr Harra responded: “Yes we had spoken to stakeholders, in particular tax professional groups, we knew that they preferred us not to proceed with it. Frankly, they would prefer us not to make these significant changes at all but to be resourced in the way that we’ve always done them.”
He added: “I’m not saying there were new stakeholders who came out of the woodwork… what there was was a strength of feeling from stakeholders, which was not what we had been expecting and which expressed concerns about matters that I believe we will be able to demonstrate to stakeholders we have taken account of. It is still a digital first strategy..”
“What we have said that we will do is we will engage with stakeholders further on how we can safely implement out digital first strategy, and that may mean doing it more slowly than we had originally planned. A lesson for us is that we did an extensive evaluation of the two trials, but we only published that on March 19 so people externally had not had the opportunity to absorb that in the same way as we had and Ministers had.”
He continued: “So I think we need to go through all of the concerns that stakeholders have, all of the evidence for whether those concerns are justified or not and our plans for how we will address them. In the meantime, we will undoubtedly be implementing our strategy more slowly than we said we would on March 19.”
