00:00If HMRC delay, well, they can repay. And today, I'm announcing a new approach for HMRC, the taxman.
00:11We've all been stuck waiting on the HMRC phone line, spending hours on hold, trying to give them
00:20money that you have earned, losing time that you'll never get back. It's enough to drive you mad.
00:30Small businesses spend 242 million hours and 25 billion pounds doing their taxes every year.
00:41The taxman, meanwhile, he fails to answer millions of calls. It takes more than a month to reply
00:51to letters, and two years can pass to process a simple refund.
00:58There's one small business owner in Manchester who was handed a 2.85 billion pound tax bill.
01:05Almost 3 billion pounds. HMRC even sent collection agents to his house when they said he wasn't
01:14paying up. Of course, it turned out that they were wrong, and the real bill was 2,500 quid.
01:21Did he get an apology? I bet he's still waiting for it. Last year, MPs were accusing HMRC of deliberately
01:29degrading its own services to force people onto the website. It's a disgrace. Frankly, it is offensive
01:39to working people, and I have had enough. So we will give HMRC a big incentive to actually provide
01:48proper customer service. So I'm announcing today that under reform government, if you spend more
01:55than half an hour waiting for HMRC to answer your call, you will get a £30 credit off your tax
02:04bill.
02:04If HMRC delay, well, they can repay. And to make sure that the staff actually hit their targets,
02:13we'll tie the pay of senior HMRC officials to their customer service performance. It's just fair.
02:22The taxman has been treating people, trying to do their best to understand an unbelievably complicated
02:30tax system appallingly. As Chancellor, I'm going to do things differently to my predecessors.
02:38HMRC will send to me daily figures on waiting times until they fix it. Now, I'm a patient man,
02:46but if they test my patients, as they are testing the patients of millions of people across our country
02:55right now, they'll be fired. And there'll be no golden parachute either. They will be waiting on hold
03:02for that for a very long time. Things are going to change under reform. The Treasury is going to do
03:10things differently.
