Last year British taxpayers spent 800 years waiting to speak to HMRC. This is the price of a world digitised on the cheap
In taking stock of how we spend our days, no one likes to think of all the hours we’ve spent on the phone to the tax office. Yet that and other necessary administrative evils are increasingly taking up our precious time.
Taxpayers spent an accumulated total of almost 800 years on hold on the phone with HM Revenue & Customs last year, according to the National Audit Office, the government’s spending watchdog. It’s one of those stats that short-circuits the brain: more than the combined lifetimes of all the people to whom our call is inevitably transferred, should anyone ever actually answer it.
Elle Hunt is a freelance journalist
