HMRC’s call response time in August exceeds 14 minutes

Callers to HMRC had to wait on average 14 minutes and 25 seconds for an officer to answer the call according to HMRC’s August performance figures. This was more than a minute longer than in July when the wait was 13 minutes and 19 seconds but a substantial improvement on April when the average wait was at least 18 minutes. However in August 59.3% of callers had to wait at least ten minutes for an HMRC agent to reply. While this is better than in April - 71.4% - it is worse than August 2021 when the percentage was 45.6%.

The percentage of telephony adviser attempts handled in August was 76.7% which is slightly higher than for the year to date (74.8%).

In total since April 2022 HMRC received 15 845 488 calls this was considerably more than...