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.
For those callers last year who did get through to an adviser, they waited an average of 23 minutes, up from just five in 2019.
The NAO’s explanation given for this “declining spiral” of customer service is by now as familiar as HMRC’s hold music: cost-cutting, ineffective management, a piecemeal transition to digital.
But this is the punishment dealt to people trying – you’d assume, from their making contact in the first place – to do the right thing. It’s almost as if the government doesn’t want us to pay our taxes.
I employ an accountant specifically to minimise my exposure to HMRC, but I often find myself wishing that her services extended to shielding me more broadly from the many other endless frustrations deemed necessary in this modern world.
A few days ago, a straightforward trip to the bank to deposit some cash into my account saw me referred from the ATM to the teller, defeating the point of having ATMs in the first place.
Yesterday I spent 40 minutes on hold on the phone trying to cancel a subscription that took five minutes to sign up to, and which promised I could cancel “anytime”. “Cancel anytime you have 40 minutes” would be more truthful advertising.
Just this morning, I spent another 40 minutes “chatting” with representatives from BT after my billing history had vanished from my online account. Somehow my login details had come mysteriously untethered from the record of my very real (and steadily increasing) payments.
They asked if I had another email address that I could use to log in. Only my work one, I said, but I’d rather not use that, not having indefinite access guaranteed. And so my BT account is now attached to my work address – and I can look forward to repeating the saga again in the future.
It bores me to describe all this almost as much as it bored me to go through it – and yet we must, just to participate in society. I have caught myself thinking recently, with disquieting frequency, the same sorts of things as my 74-year-old father says about “so-called progress”, and “How is anyone supposed to know?”
I used to brush off Dad’s complaints, saying that it was all actually more convenient to manage one’s bills and banking online, and buy tickets without needing to print them out. But now the changes that were promised as time- and effort-saving have backfired, costing us more of both.
The problem I didn’t foresee is how service providers would leap at the savings dangled by “the transition to digital”, while also seeking to do it on the cheap, without accounting for the costs of protracted and inefficient delivery (not to mention, significant accessibility concerns). Yes, security is important – but do I need three separate codes texted to me just to access my broadband bills?
The real affront in this approach is that it’s creating more work, for everyone. “Customer service professionals”, invariably overworked and underpaid, are now obliged by user surveys to make halting digital small talk. Those of us on the other side of the interaction are forced to laboriously type out our queries and complaints, or hold the line for help.
I am not religious, but my every brush with these thankless, labyrinthine, digitised-but-not-that-well systems fills me with a fervent belief that this is not how we should be spending our finite time on God’s increasingly less green Earth. In the early 20th century, the philosopher Bertrand Russell imagined that technological developments would alleviate us of this tedious, time-consuming busywork, ushering in a golden age of leisure. Instead, we’ve found ourselves with more, higher-tech busywork.
Yet still, in responding to the HMRC wait times, the NAO has the gall to point to staff productivity. “Sick-note culture”, the Tories’ scapegoat du jour, is an inversion of reality. The productivity crisis isn’t because we’re constantly pulling sickies to shirk work; we’re sick because we are obliged to work, constantly – often, while simultaneously on hold with HMRC. Either that, or we’re all too busy on the phone.
When I was at the bank, seeking to deposit that cash that a machine was unable to help me with, I overheard a woman being told cheques could now be handled online. She did not share the teller’s enthusiasm for this news, having made the long trip specially. “They’re doing their best to get rid of you, aren’t they,” she said darkly to the woman on the other side of the glass.
The teller’s face briefly fell. “Oh, I don’t know,” she said, recovering. “There’s always plenty to do.”