Speeches by Hatton.

“ Could you go into a little bit more detail? What are you doing to ensure that those 7 million taxpayers are not shut out of accessing HMRC services? How are you assisting them to use digital services where they can?”

“ I appreciate that the benefit of hindsight is a marvellous thing, but as chief executive, do you not think that actually a more urgent and pressing demand for additional resources would have been a wiser approach, rather than taking us all up the hill with this first press release, saying, “We are going to shut d…”

“ Would you blame Ministers for not heeding your calls, then?”

“ So do you think, following the advice that you, Sir Jim, gave to the Minister, that they made the wrong decision?”

“ Okay. Let us move on to this point around support for vulnerable customers. Last February, this Committee found that HMRC customer service had reached an all-time low. Do you not agree that this sorry state of affairs has been very, very damaging to your credibility, so there needs t…”

“ Let us move on. The most recent HMRC customer service report estimates that “as many as 20% of customers need assistance using its digital services. It is not clear that HMRC has…set aside sufficient capacity” or expertise “to provide” additional “customer support”. Can you try again to reassure this Co…”

“ Did you ask for additional resources?”

“ My final question is very short, so it would be good to have a very short answer. Do you think that these relief schemes provide good value for money for the British taxpayer?”

“ I want to quickly touch on something, because Nesil is making such an important point. Nearly 40,000 calls were cut off after being forced to wait 70 minutes. That is not just “not ideal”; it is bloody awful. Why do you not warn those 40,000 people? Surely that would be a simple thing that you could do. If you ar…”

“ That is not the same. At 65 minutes, you could go, “By the way, in five minutes’ time, if we haven’t got back to you, we are going to hang up.” People deserve to know. It is so frustrating if you work, if you have childcare or if you have other responsibilities. It is a really appalling way to treat customers.”

“ Urgently.”

“ Why don’t you warn people, Sir Jim? Why do you not warn my constituents when they have been waiting in excess of an hour that that is going to happen, rather than doing it with no clear information? It is really infuriating.”

“ But they do. Over 40,000 customers did get to that point with no warning, and it is infuriating.”

“ That is like going into a restaurant to make a dinner reservation and the maître d’ turns around to say, “Oh, absolutely jam-packed yesterday, you couldn’t have found a free table for love nor money”—but I am not here yesterday; I am here today to make a reservation and have dinner. If they can do it, s…”

“ It is a generic information base—that is what you are saying—so if it is in the morning, this is what it tends to be like in the morning, and if it is in the afternoon, this is what it tends to be like in the afternoon. That begs the question of why you have any system at all, if you already know how busy you wil…”

“ But they do not know anything, because you hang up on them after 70 minutes and do not tell them that you are going to do it, so they are left in the dark.”

“ Let me take us back to earlier this year. I have two press releases published by HMRC in front of me. One was on 19 March and the second was the day after, on 20 March. On the 19th, you said basically you were going to shut down a large proportion of your phone line services for a big chunk of the year. Unde…”

“ When that went out on 19 March, did you think, “This is going to go down badly with the public”?”

“ If there was a high degree of scepticism, why did you do it anyway? Obviously, that scepticism was proved to be accurate, because a day later, the whole thing sort of collapsed.”

“ So your current estimate that it is just a third of a billion.”