HMRC bets up to £2.4bn that Salesforce can end the queue

HMRC has picked Salesforce to rebuild the system that holds taxpayers' records and handles their queries, in a deal worth up to £2.4 billion including VAT. The ten-year contract, published at the end of September 2026, runs to September 2036 and could be extended to 2041. It comes in the same week that ministers promised to bring more public services back in-house.

Britain's tax collector is betting that one big software platform can fix its famously long phone queues. It has made bets like this before.

What HMRC is buying

CRM stands for customer relationship management: the software that keeps track of who you are, what you've asked and what's been done about it. According to The Register, Salesforce will provide customer records, case management, messaging, marketing campaigns, reporting, analytics and AI features. Other suppliers may plug in extras such as identity checks, fraud detection and data integration.

Salesforce beat Pegasystems (Pega) to the contract. CX Today reports that bids were scored 70% on quality, 20% on price and 10% on social value. The price has grown along the way. The Register says HMRC's early market engagement in April 2025 put the requirement at around £1 billion, and the final ceiling is more than double that, although "up to" figures include extensions and VAT and aren't the same as guaranteed spend.

It's half of a bigger plan. In April HMRC awarded Capgemini a contact-centre contract worth up to £600 million including VAT, which is meant to integrate with the new CRM. CX Today says Capgemini is working with NiCE and Route 101 on that part. HMRC's stated aim is to "join up customer contact across channels", with a portal, app and a more conversational digital assistant handling simple questions and human advisers kept for complex cases.

Why it matters to anyone who's called HMRC

The case for change is easy to make. The Register reports that in 2023-24 HMRC "disconnected nearly 44,000" callers who had already waited 70 minutes for an adviser, because its systems couldn't cope with demand. Anyone who has tried to sort out a tax code by phone will recognise the problem.

If this works, the difference should be visible: fewer calls needed, because the app and online account can actually resolve things, and advisers who can see your whole history instead of asking you to explain everything again. If it doesn't, you'll mostly notice it as a chatbot standing between you and a person.

Ada's take: big contracts, long memories

The timing is awkward. On 28 September the government announced a new unit to bring critical services back in-house and a Public Interest Test for central government service contracts worth £1 million or more, after the Capita pensions fiasco. Within days, its tax department confirmed a 10-to-15-year platform deal with a US software giant. The two aren't really contradictory, since nobody expects HMRC to write its own CRM software from scratch, but they do show how hard it is to escape long-term supplier dependence.

That dependence is the real risk here. Once a department's records, workflows and AI tools all live on one vendor's platform, switching gets expensive. The Register notes that HMRC promised to move away from Capgemini on its main IT contract, then extended the relationship with another £4.2 billion. As we wrote about the NHS and Palantir's data platform, the time to plan the exit is when you sign the deal, not when the break clause arrives.

The AI element deserves scrutiny too. A digital assistant that answers simple questions well is welcome. One that is used to cut adviser numbers before it's proven would just move the queue somewhere else.

To be fair to HMRC

HMRC's current systems are a patchwork, and doing nothing is the most expensive option of all. A competitive tender, a scoring system weighted towards quality, and a ceiling figure that includes VAT and possible extensions are all reasonable features of a big public contract. Salesforce is a mainstream choice used by governments elsewhere, and keeping the CRM and contact-centre contracts separate gives HMRC some leverage. The test will be what taxpayers experience, and that won't be clear for a few years.

Mind the hype. HMRC is spending up to £2.4 billion to stop putting you on hold. Don't hang up yet.

Sources: The Register · CX Today · The Register (insourcing) · The Register (Capgemini)