Treasury Committee — hearing of 9 September 2026: transcript & video

00:02 - 01:08

Speaker 2

Welcome to the Treasury Select Committee on Wednesday the 19th of September 2026. Today we're looking at the work of His Majesty's Revenue and Customs, one of our regular sessions to examine on behalf of the taxpayer how well the revenue is working in collecting tax and supporting its customers, the taxpayer. I'm delighted to have in front of us a panel of senior people from HMRC. John-Paul Marks is the First Permanent Secretary and Chief Executive of HMRC. He's joined from my left to right by Penny Ciniewicz, who's the Director General for Customer Compliance at HMRC, Carol Bristow is the Director General for Borders and Trade at HMRC, and Jonathan Athow is the Director General for Strategy and Policy.

So a warm welcome to you all. JP Marks, you've been in position now for about a year. You've obviously had quite an eventful summer as well, never uneventful I suppose in your line of work. What are the top two or three things that you are proud of and a couple of challenges that still remain for you in your role as Permanent Secretary?

01:08 - 02:22

Speaker 3

Thanks Chair, afternoon to the Committee. So things that we're proud of, if I start with our compliance operation, Penny can say a bit more through the afternoon as you wish, but as when we saw you last time, we were talking about the capacity build that we had committed to and the fact that that was a steep curve. We're ahead of that plan, which we're pleased about. Obviously, you know, we need to consolidate that capability and realize the productive output of that, but we've made a really good start and credit and thanks to the team for the hard work. Last year we achieved 50 billion, over 50 billion of compliance yield for the first time.

We're aiming for that to be over 60 billion in 29-30. So that's the level of additional tax revenue we will seek to collect with additional capacity and capability, but so far we judge that on track. If I come onto customer service, moving in the right direction, can come onto some of the proof points of that, that complaints is down a third, average speed of answer is less than 10 minutes this month. And if we look at the take-up of our app, it's up over another 2 million. We're aiming to take that to 10 million next year if we can.

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