Robert Jenrick has announced that a Reform UK HMRC tax rebate of £30 would be applied to the bills of taxpayers kept on hold for more than half an hour, in a policy unveiled at a media conference in central London.
Jenrick, Reform’s economy spokesman and a former Conservative MP, said HMRC’s treatment of taxpayers was ‘offensive to working people’ and pledged that a Reform government would also tie the pay of senior HMRC officials to customer service performance targets. To prevent abuse of the scheme, he said the credit would be limited to two claims per taxpayer in any given tax year.
Reform UK HMRC tax rebate: what Jenrick announced
‘Frankly, it is offensive to working people and I have had enough,’ Jenrick said. ‘So, we will give HMRC a big incentive to actually provide proper customer service.’
He set out the plan in direct terms: ‘I’m announcing today that under a Reform government, if you spend more than half an hour waiting for HMRC to answer your call, you will get a £30 credit off your tax bill. If HMRC delay, they can repay.’
On tying pay to performance, he added: ‘We’ll tie the pay of senior HMRC officials to their customer service performance.’
The announcement was framed around a Parliament Public Accounts Committee report from January 2025, which accused HMRC of seeking to ‘degrade its telephone service to drive taxpayers to digital channels’. The MPs’ report found that nearly 44,000 customers were cut off without warning after being on hold for more than an hour in 2024, and concluded that ‘HMRC’s treatment of taxpayers has damaged trust in the tax system’.
Those findings were rejected as ‘completely baseless’ by HMRC’s then chief executive at the time of the report’s publication.
HMRC says service has improved, but critics are not convinced
HMRC pushed back on the broader picture painted by Reform. A spokesperson said average call waiting times now stand at around 11 minutes and that overall customer satisfaction is at around 80%, with more people than ever using its digital services, including millions using the HMRC app. The tax authority said its customer service performance had ‘improved significantly’ over the past two years.
HMRC also noted that 80% of customer interactions now take place digitally, with phone advisers focused on vulnerable customers, those without internet access, and people with particularly complex tax affairs.
Reform’s Reform UK HMRC tax rebate proposal is partly a response to those digital-first changes, which critics argue have effectively reduced access for people who need to speak to someone directly. Jenrick’s framing positions the £30 credit less as a consumer reward and more as a financial penalty on the tax authority for failing to answer calls promptly.
GDPR overhaul also on the table
Jenrick used the same event to announce a separate pledge: scrapping the UK’s current data protection framework in favour of a lighter-touch approach. He said the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which mirrors EU legislation and was brought into domestic law after Brexit, had ‘strangled’ technology firms and small businesses.
Reform UK said it would replace the current framework with rules modelled on New Zealand’s privacy legislation, which the party says carries the lightest regulatory touch of any regime still recognised as ‘adequate’ by the European Union.
Labour rejected both proposals, accusing Reform of wanting to ‘scrap vital safeguards that protect people’s private data’ with what it called ‘unworkable and unserious plans’.
HMRC said it had been contacted for a further response to Reform’s announcements.
