Revenue and Customs: Standards

As published in the Spending Review 2025 Departmental Efficiency Plans, HM Revenue and Customs will be delivering significant efficiencies of £886m per year by 2028-29 in five areas:

• moving to digital services – HMRC will use digital services as its main form of customer communication and the primary method of interaction. These services are more convenient, more productive, and more cost-effective;
• improving and modernising the IT estate – HMRC will replace its legacy IT infrastructure with modern platforms and services. Moving to modern IT platforms reduces risk, enables decommissioning of costly systems, and provides more productive digital tools for staff and customers;
• continuous improvement and productivity – HMRC has a strong track record of continuous improvement activity. Improvements in training, guidance and retention have also enabled HMRC to deliver productivity benefits;
• restructuring the physical estate – HMRC will consolidate its offices into modern regional centres, exit some sites and streamline its facilities contracts; and
• upstream compliance – HMRC aims to prevent non-compliance from happening proactively, rather than reacting when it has occurred. This prevents costly compliance and litigation, as well as closing the tax gap.