Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-99)
HM REVENUE AND
CUSTOMS
7 NOVEMBER 2007
Q80 Mr Touhig: 2008 is your date
to open, is it?
Mr Gray: We do not have a precise
date. Our key criterion is to make sure it would be safe for people
before we open it.
Mr Touhig: There does seem to be a problem
though, does there not, about IT systems? I tabled a question
to the Chancellor of the Exchequer about your tax credit IT system
on 29 October, asking how many recorded instances of failures
of the IT system that deals with working tax credits there had
been in the last 12 months. The Financial Secretary replied to
say that the information is not available in the format requested.
If you cannot get a simple answer to a simple question—but
perhaps that is for me to pursue elsewhere.
Alan Williams: Try asking it in Welsh!
Q81 Mr Touhig: Perhaps I should.
While I commend your Department's work in reducing the average
time to answer calls—and I really do commend it because
I had a problem with a telephone bill recently and I can tell
you that over five days I spent 148 minutes ringing BT about a
bill query and never once was the phone answered, so you are certainly
way ahead—in December 2006 the Service Transformation
Report stated that monetary savings of a staggering 25% could
be made across government departments in improving their telephone
call centres. Have you looked at this report? Do you think there
is anything there that you could learn to improve your rate even
further?
Mr Gray: We are certainly looking
to learn. Nick wants to add something to this.
Mr Lodge: We are working with
other government departments and indeed local authorities as part
of the new Contact Council to implement recommendations from the
Service Transformation Report which I think is where you
have drawn that recommendation from. The key elements which you
have just touched on are to reduce by 50% avoidable contact and
to migrate 50% of contact seeking purely information from contact
centres to the website. That is in large measure what gives rise
to the large savings quoted in Sir David's report. So, yes, we
are looking at that. We have been looking at the extent to which
people phone us where that contact is avoidable, for example—and
this was touched on earlier—at improving our forms and our
guidance so that people do not have to phone us in the first place,
and of course we are looking, as we have said already, at improving
our website so that more people can use the website rather than
other channels of communication.
Q82 Mr Touhig: That might help with
one of your targets which I will briefly refer to because we are
running out of time. We read on page 19 in the Report that: "The
main Income Tax Self Assessment return is accompanied by a separate
35 page guidance booklet" with extra forests of guidance
on pages for the taxpayer's needs to fill out any supplementary
pages. Your Department's sustainable development policy and plan
lists as one of its objective "the reduction of paper consumption".
You are joking, are you not?
Mr Gray: We are not joking. Increasingly,
in self assessment, we provide people with the parts of the form
and the parts of the guidance they need, so we encourage people
to indicate which categories they need to fill in and we only
send them those pages. On the guidance, we do want to reduce the
guidance, not least for environmental reasons but also to simplify
things, but we have to strike the right balance between giving
people the information they need to try to avoid inaccuracy while
not wasting paper.
Q83 Mr Touhig: Thirty-five pages
of guidance is a lot of guidance, Mr Gray.
Mr Gray: In relation to the whole
of the income tax system, we are looking to drive that down, but
I do not think it is excessive. But we are looking to reduce it
steadily while not giving up on accuracy in the process.
Q84 Mr Touhig: One in four people
who have telephoned you have had to ring back to get further information,
so you do have a bit of an information gap there. You are providing
so much information on paper and, at the same time, people are
finding it difficult to get accurate information.
Mr Gray: We are trying to get
better at getting the right balance in giving people the right
information in the right format to reduce those avoidable calls,
as Nick was just saying.
Q85 Mr Touhig: You are definitely
green?
Mr Gray: We are aspiring to be
greener.
Q86 Mr Dunne: Mr Gray, when did the
contact centre strategies start within HMRC?
Mr Gray: I wonder if I can pass
that question to Nick.
Mr Lodge: I would have to check
and if I get this wrong I will correct it afterwards, if I may,
but I believe we ran our first pilots in one of the predecessor
departments, Inland Revenue, in around 1995.
Q87 Mr Dunne: By 2005-06, you had
been running contact centres for over ten years?
Mr Lodge: If I am correct on the
date, then it would have been about ten years.
Mr Gray: They are not on the scale
we are running them over that full period.
Q88 Mr Dunne: Okay, it built up over
that period, I accept that. How would you characterise the performance
in 2005-06 when—if I have read this table seven on page
14 correctly—the average taxpayer had to try to get through
nearly three and a half times before they succeeded in making
a call through the contact centre? How do you characterise that
performance after ten years of operating contact centres?
Mr Gray: As I was saying to Dr
Pugh, I characterise it as trying to get the right balance between
resourcing our contact centres within affordable means and offering
reasonable levels of service to people. We have heard from your
colleagues today that our relative performance is perhaps rather
better than some of our competitors.
Q89 Mr Dunne: I would characterise
it as hopeless. The postbag I have had from advisers helping taxpayers
to try and see their way through the complexity of their forms
suggests there is considerable frustration out there amongst the
professionals who seek to interact with HMRC. Clearly it has got
better over the last year, I recognise that and I applaud you
for that, but to take the target referred to by Mr Touhig on paragraph
2.9 on page 13, it has a target which allows you to achieve your
target if people get through during the course of the day, it
is not a very demanding target if you start telephoning at nine
in the morning and you still have not answered it by five in the
afternoon, because I assume you are talking nine-to-five hours.
That is not a very demanding target, is it?
Mr Gray: That happens to be the
target we were set and have been operating to over this last period,
but we are also increasingly looking at other measures, like the
average waiting time on calls, so that we are targeting not just
can you get through at any point during the day, but in relation
to any one call, on average, what is the performance. I quite
accept your point that we need to have a range of indicators and
measures.
Q90 Mr Dunne: Do you have any way
of measuring success in solving a problem when somebody makes
a call?
Mr Gray: We have two measures,
both of which Nick referred to briefly earlier. One is we have
our internal quality assessment process where we have a large
sample of calls checked by our quality assessors, and that is
currently running at a figure of about 95% quality achieved. In
terms of a more qualitative view of do our customers, taxpayers,
feel they are getting decent service, then we are on the most
recent figure of 92% expressing themselves satisfied or very satisfied.
That is several points ahead of the general industry average,
which tends to be in the high eighties.
Q91 Mr Dunne: What sample survey
do you do to get that feedback?
Mr Gray: I think we contract this
out to an opinion research organisation. We do not do it ourselves,
we commission somebody to do it independently for us.
Q92 Mr Dunne: That is a general survey
of the population at large rather than targeted to people who
are frequent users?
Mr Gray: Nick, can you add something
on what the criteria are?
Mr Lodge: This is a survey of
people who have phoned up our contact centres, and the way the
sample is drawn up is that people are asked at the start of the
call whether they would mind taking part in a survey. That general
population then goes through to the independent company who phones
them most often the week after they have had contact with us so
it is still fresh in their minds. They run through a series of
standard questions with them and then produce benchmark reports
for us month-on-month, quarter-on-quarter and year-on-year.
Q93 Mr Dunne: That sounds like a
fair sampling. How do you calculate how many callers are unable
to be dealt with by a first contact and whether or not they have
success in getting their query answered by a second call, a third
call or a call back? Do you do call backs?
Mr Gray: We do call backs, which
was the discussion we were having earlier with your colleagues.
Where there is a technical point being raised and the contact
centre agent feels they cannot deal with it satisfactorily, they
try to pass it on immediately to a technical expert, but if they
are not available then our standard practice is to offer a call
back rather than expect the person to have to initiate another
inward call.
Q94 Mr Dunne: That is standard practice,
did I hear that correctly? You said your standard practice is
to offer a call back?
Mr Gray: If one agent cannot get
hold of a more technical colleague, then we will offer a call
back rather than expecting a call in. Is that right, Nick?
Mr Lodge: Indeed, or in some cases
where the enquiry has to be referred to the office which holds
the paper file, for example, in those cases most often that office
will call the customer back.
Q95 Mr Dunne: Thank you. I am going
to hold you to that when I am next contacted by one of my constituents
who has had a very different experience.
Mr Gray: We are going to have
lots of mystery calls here!
Q96 Mr Dunne: On a totally separate
point, can you tell me how many individual reference numbers an
individual taxpayer would have in his dealings with Revenue?
Mr Gray: I am afraid I cannot
off the top of my head. It could be several and I suspect it rather
depends on the complexity of their tax affairs, but can I offer
you a note on that? [3]
Q97 Mr Dunne: I would appreciate it if
you would write a note about this because clearly most people
use their National Insurance number and that covers the vast majority
of simple cases, but in complex cases, my understanding is there
is a relatively large number of different numbers which could
be used. It would be very helpful to the Committee and it might
help you improve your services.
Mr Gray: We will try to answer
that as to where we are today. What we are increasingly looking
to do is to integrate our systems in such a way that we increasingly
move towards a unique identifier which acts as a gateway to the
others. As far as individuals are concerned, the National Insurance
number is the key.
Q98 Mr Dunne: Thank you. Referring
to paragraph 3.13, I would like to congratulate the NAO on coming
up with this SMOG, Simple Measures of Gobbledegook, which is the
first time I have come across it and I congratulate you for finding
it. Does the HMRC use SMOG as a means of reducing the gobbledegook
within its forms?
Mr Gray: It is one of a number
of readability tests which I think we refer to over time. We do
not uniquely use it. Like all systems, it has its advantages and
disadvantages. What we are seeking to use is a range of tools
and feedback mechanisms to test the readability and degree of
understanding of our material.
Q99 Mr Dunne: Over half the forms
surveyed by the NAO failed the test of readability unless you
have got GCSE English, which currently, I regret to say, only
a minority of the population have. The question is what can you
do to try and make more people who have to fill in self-assessment
forms do so?
Mr Gray: We are facing the balancing
act, which Dr Pugh was asking me about earlier, of trying our
best, and I am sure there is scope for us to handle technical
things more simply, more straightforwardly in readable ways, but
recognising at the margin we may have an awkward trade-off between
the degree of simpleness of the language we are using and ensuring
we are getting accuracy rather than simplifying so much that we
do not get the sense over.
3 Note by witness: For taxpayers as individuals,
the dominant number is the National Insurance Number or NINO.
This is the key reference for employment issues, tax credits and
student loans. It is also widely used as a reference for other
sources of investment and trading income for individuals, including
the Construction Industry Scheme, alongside the Unique Taxpayer
Reference. The taxpayer will also have a tax district reference.
Beyond that, the number of references an individual will need
to use will depend on the roles he or she adopts from time to
time. For example, an individual may have a PAYE reference number
and an Accounts Office number for returns relating to his or her
employees and payment of PAYE, a Capital Taxes Office reference
if he or she is handling an estate subject to inheritance tax,
a VAT Registration number for a business, or a trader number for
imports. Back
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