Will HMRC's digital initiatives make customers' lives any easier?
SIR – You report (June 12) that HMRC is to stop sending letters to customers.
A year ago I was encouraged by HMRC to start using its app. I duly downloaded it and tried to log in but was refused access, as I needed to provide proof of identity – specifically a passport number or driving licence.
I am in my eighties, my driving licence has been revoked owing to my poor eyesight, and my passport has expired as I no longer travel abroad. My only valid means of identification is my bus pass, which is not accepted.
The alternative was to contact HMRC by phone. After holding on for an hour, I gave up.
Meanwhile, HMRC continues to tax my pension with impunity.
George Kelly
Buckingham
SIR – My mother has dementia. She has none of the documents required to establish her identity and access HMRC's online systems. I have power of attorney, but am not allowed to use these systems on her behalf, so am forced to spend hours on the phone and send letters that never get a reply.
HMRC has taken more tax than is due for two years. I am told by the telephone operatives that my mother does not need to file a tax return, but that is the only way to get a rebate.
Is HMRC setting out to confuse customers?
Gillian Courage
Cheltenham, Gloucestershire
SIR – HMRC is to stop writing to taxpayers, except when demanding payments. It already refuses to speak to many of us on the phone.
It took my wife 10 months to get a reply to a letter she wrote last year; this meant being incorrectly charged interest, which she had to appeal against.
A year earlier, only two figures on the assessment form sent to me were recognisable. A five-minute phone call could have resolved the problem, but this was not possible.
In both cases, we resorted to sending letters higher up the organisation. This did the trick.
E R Dring
Tadworth, Surrey
SIR – Yesterday morning I received an email from HMRC (having opted out of receiving post) telling me that there was a new message in my account. I duly logged in. The message informed me that I would receive a statement – in four days' time. What was the point of this?
Clare Morgan
Alderley Edge, Cheshire
SIR – Following the news that a phishing scam led to the loss of £49 million, a spokesman for HMRC blithely declared: 'Our customers suffered no financial loss.'
This reflects the myopic thinking of the Civil Service. Of course customers suffered a loss: the money cannot now be spent on what it was collected for.
Des Morgan
Swindon, Wiltshire
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Daily Mail
an hour ago
- Daily Mail
Chelsea's five pricey bosses, Liverpool's gamble on Arne Slot... and Man United's mid-season swoop for Ruben Amorim - where does Thomas Frank rank in the Premier League's most expensive football managers?
Sometimes you have to blow the budget to get what you want. We often see Premier League clubs fork out frankly laughable sums of money to acquire the world's best talent on the pitch. The amount of cash chucked about is growing by the year, and Liverpool 's £116m bid to sign Florian Wirtz is the latest mammoth transfer fee to be thrown down in an era of excessive wealth in the game. The same now goes for managers, too. Gone are the days when clubs would turn to assistant coaches to step up when the hot seat becomes available. Nor do they wait until one falls out of work and they can snap them up for free. No, managers come with a cost now. Your main target is already in a job? Well, it's time to cough up. It has taken £10million for Tottenham to prise Thomas Frank from the grasp of Brentford, where he spent nine years. Funnily enough, he started his tenure as an assistant before becoming the big boss, but as I said: we don't see that anymore. While it's not quite the crazy figures being slapped about for players, it's still a big enough fee to earn Frank a place in the top 10 most expensive Premier League managers of all time. Want to know the other nine? Well, Mail Sport is taking a deep dive into the list - follow us in. =9. Maurizio Sarri - Chelsea - £5m Our first entry includes, you guessed it, Chelsea. Big fees in football and the Blues are like bangers and mash on a plate, they just marry up so well. The first of five Chelsea entries on this list is Maurizio Sarri, who they splashed £5m on to take him from Napoli in 2018. Was it worth it? Well, no, as is the case with a fair few in this top 10. Sarri, whose relationship with the Chelsea fans was less than positive, lasted just one season on the job before returning to Italy with Juventus. But he did win a trophy, as he led the club to Europa League glory. =9. Ronald Koeman - Everton - £5m Arne Slot was not the first Dutchman to land in a dugout on Merseyside. Before the charismatic but calm 46-year-old made the Premier League look like a breeze, his compatriot Ronald Koeman was in the hot seat across Stanley Park. After two highly successful years with Southampton, Everton were so impressed by Koeman that they paid the south coast side £5m for his services back in 2016. At first, it seemed like one hell of a deal. Koeman guided Everton to a seventh-placed finish in his first season in charge, in turn bringing European football back to Goodison Park following a dismal final year under Roberto Martinez. But one year of fun is all he got. Second-season syndrome hit hard for Koeman at Everton, and just two months into it he was sacked following a horrendous start to the campaign. 8. Jose Mourinho - Chelsea - £5.2m The Special One. The one that changed Chelsea. The one that brought glory to Stamford Bridge. 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Rodgers even led the club to their first-ever FA Cup triumph, beating Chelsea in the 2021 final. However, things soon went downhill and he was sacked in 2023 in the final months of what had been a dreadful campaign, in which the Foxes were relegated. 6. Ruben Amorim - Manchester United - £9.25m Manchester United's move for Ruben Amorim has cost them more than just money, that's for sure. You don't need me to tell you that his arrival has not got to plan, thus far. The hierarchy at Old Trafford initially opted to hand Erik ten Hag a new deal last summer, which meant the cost of sacking him and bringing in Amorim became much higher than it needed to be. Overall, roughly £21m was spent to fire the Dutchman and hire the Portuguese boss from Sporting Lisbon. All of that money to end up with a record-low Premier League points tally, their worst finish on record, their lowest-ever goal tally, and an abject defeat to Tottenham in the Europa League final. Now, Amorim is still in charge and he could miraculously turn things around which would mean the money was worth it. But based on the evidence so far, it doesn't look like it was. 5. Arne Slot - Liverpool - £9.42m 'Arne Slot! Na-na, na, na-na!' Jurgen Klopp was the first to sing it and now it's a song belted out on the Anfield terraces with pride with each passing week. Nobody thought that Klopp could be replaced, but the same was said about Bill Shankly. Slot is the Bob Paisley of his time, and he only cost the Reds hierarchy £9.42m. Just 8.12 per cent of the amount the club are paying to bring in the mercurial Wirtz from Bayer Leverkusen. The German will do extremely well to even get close to having the impact that Slot has had on Liverpool. Few managers just rock up to what is known as the toughest league in the world and make it look like a cakewalk in their first season. Mourinho did it 20 years ago, and Slot followed in his footsteps by bringing home a record-equalling 20th English top-flight title to Anfield. Even if the Dutchman struggles to win another in the coming seasons, the fee to bring him to Merseyside from Feyenoord will still have been worth it. =3. Enzo Maresca - Chelsea - £10m As you can see, the further up the list we go, the more recent the deals were made. And of course, the more Chelsea are involved. We have hit double figures for the first time in this feature, with Enzo Maresca being wrestled away from Leicester last summer, following an impressive promotion from the Championship - which was short-lived - for £10m. The move for the Italian has paid off, so far. In his first season in charge, Maresca guided Chelsea back to the promised land of the Champions League through a fourth-placed finish, while he also picked up the Conference League trophy as the cherry on top. Many questioned the appointment at the time, but 12 months on it is plausible to see Chelsea as challengers to Liverpool and Slot's crown next season. Maresca has done a stellar job. =3. Thomas Frank - Tottenham - £10m Here we are. The newest entry into the charts has landed alongside Maresca in third spot. When Ange Postecoglou was sacked, there was an outpouring of rage in WhatsApp group chats around the country, in offices, and on social media. Everywhere. Football fans simply couldn't believe it. After all, the Australian delivered on his promise. 'I always win things in my second year,' Postecoglou said in September, and that is exactly what he did by winning Tottenham's first trophy in 17 years via the Europa League. Still, that didn't matter to Daniel Levy who decided to hand £10m to fellow Londoners Brentford in order to bring Frank to north London, and all of a sudden the rage is no more. 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Chelsea would go on to produce a miracle in Munich two months later, winning their first Champions League title under interim boss Roberto Di Matteo, while Villas-Boas moved across London to bitter rivals Tottenham, where he would also struggle. 1. Graham Potter - Chelsea - £21.5m £3.07m. That's how much Graham Potter ended up costing Chelsea each month he was in charge. Just the seven, but it felt like a lifetime for those in Blue. Potter's arrival was meant to signify a new era at Stamford Bridge under Todd Boehly and his big-spending crew, but it ended up being a false dawn. To spend £21.5m on bringing Potter in from Brighton to then only give him seven months was baffling, but it shows just how badly things went for the English manager in west London. Most expensive managers in English football history 1. Graham Potter (Chelsea) - £21.5m 2. Andre Villas-Boas (Chelsea) - £13.3m =3. Thomas Frank (Tottenham) - £10m =3. Enzo Maresca (Chelsea) - £10m 5. 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Times
an hour ago
- Times
The same, but different: our new website explained
People generally take a dim view of unexpected change in the daily staples of their lives, including the design of their newspapers. So the top brass here were prepared for a bit of flak when they overhauled our digital offering. A lot of the rumpus centred on problems with finding items that had previously been reached with a couple of nonchalant clicks, but to judge by readers' comments and emails, most are getting their bearings again. One aspect of our overhauled website and app that may be less obvious to readers is that it completes the transition away from so-called edition-based publishing, an approach inherited from print that does not work well for fast-moving online news. Again, some readers, used to a once or twice-daily serving of stories, have found this disconcerting, such as Tim Dawson, who was puzzled not to have been able to track down online a piece he had read in print. 'I had assumed that all of your daily content was available via the app and the website,' Tim said. 'Is this not the case, and if it is not, how much of the content is not offered via the app and the website?' Our head of digital, Edward Roussel, explained why an article might appear in print but not digital. Breaking news stories appear first online and in the app. A version is later prepared for print. There is no value in taking the print article and publishing it online as we would be duplicating stories. In other words, the print and digital articles may be substantially different. Second, he said, we edit the app in the same way as we edit print. That is to say, we determine an optimum number of daily stories, across a dozen broad areas of coverage, and focus on the quality of those stories. 'One thing we don't do,' Edward stressed, 'is simply dump all print stories online.' 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The Wurlitzer firm, founded in 1850s Cincinnati, began by importing musical instruments from Germany and moved into making pianos and then the organs that accompanied silent films. Jukeboxes followed — but no modes of transport, unless you count the organ that rises out of a pit in Blackpool Tower. In time the jukebox and organ operations split, but both were eventually owned by Gibson, the guitar brand favoured by Les Paul, Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page and Angus Young of AC/DC, not to mention James Hetfield of Metallica. I don't think we can claim, though, that Vogt felt as if he had been thunderstruck, or riding the lightning. I must confess I've not read Ronald McIntosh's 1990 blockbuster Hyphenation: Discussion of the Changing Principles of Word Division, so I am not an authority on a subject considered 'stretchingly difficult' by Fowler's, but our style guide has wise advice on hyphens, which boils down to: use sparingly. They are tolerated in words with prefixes to prevent a collision of identical letters, as in co-opt and pre-empt, and likewise in composite terms such as cut-throat. Which will not, you might think, be much comfort to Dale Savage of Loughton, who complained: 'Your paper seems to have dispensed with the hyphen when appending a prefix to another word. This creates confusion to the eye and brain, trying to figure out what this strange new word is. When modifying a word with a prefix, please use a hyphen. The worst and most common example is 'miniseries'.' I can see that 'miniseries' looks like the love child of miseries and ministries, which sounds like gripping TV and is presumably why our style guide does prescribe a hyphen in mini-series. When it comes to radioisotopes, though, we're less accommodating. The outing for the cod-Latin motor bus poem last week was a trip down memory lane for David Marchant of Kent and Nuala Lonie of Linlithgow. For David it brought back Latin for Today and translating Fabula de Petro Cuniculo for bedtime stories — 'still a standard joke in my family as we recall Dominus McGregor'. Nuala impressively 'dredged up from memory' some extra couplets I had not included. Peter Lowthian of Marlow was thinking about Tolkien — who, you may recall, didn't write the poem. He had been to an exhibition at the British Library that 'featured some of Tolkien's correspondence, including a fan letter from Joni Mitchell, which I suspect impressed me more than it did him. Quite a few people wrote to him in the languages he invented, which Tolkien corrected in red ink and sent straight back again.' One of those red marks would have ornamented my column last week, for I erroneously referred to 'Elvish languages' when I clearly meant 'Elven' — many thanks to Ben Rapp for setting me straight on the correct way to refer to imaginary tongues. Write to Feedback by emailing feedback@ or by post to 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF
Telegraph
an hour ago
- Telegraph
Sorry parents, but your baby has no business being in the office
She was, explained entrepreneur Davina Schonle, 'humiliated'. She'd travelled for three hours to attend the Monday sessions of London Tech Week, a gathering of global leaders in technology at Olympia, a vast exhibition centre in Kensington, west London. Schonle had been looking forward to the day's agenda, which included Red Bull's Christian Horner discussing tech advances in F1, Baroness Lane-Fox explaining how AI can be a force for equality, insights into what investors are looking for in tech companies and a panel making the case for launching tech businesses in the UK. Schonle's business is a start-up called Humanvantage AI, and she was particularly keen on the prospect of networking with so many key figures in the industry. The problem was she didn't make it through the door, not even to registration. Monday would not be a day on which she could add to her collection of lanyards. The reason: her plus one, Isadella. Doubtless brilliant, a hoover of information, a magnet of human interest, very possibly with a great future in supply chain inventory management – but, unfortunately, just eight months old. Mother protested, baby babbled, and the pair were forced to turn tail and make the three-hour journey straight back home. Schonle has since complained about the refused entry, posting on LinkedIn (obviously) that: 'I should be able to build my company with [Isadella] by my side… Doesn't our future belong to the kids?' London Tech Week then put out a statement saying that one of its attendees 'wasn't able to attend with her baby because of the event's age restrictions. We're very sorry she had this experience and have reached out directly to apologise and discuss what happened.' The statement continued: 'We've listened carefully and we are going to review our approach to age restrictions and facilities ahead of next year's London Tech Week.' So while they might be sorry, they're not committing to allowing under-16s and neither should they. And not just because it's the tech-savvy young teens who are about to steal all their jobs and blow them out of the water. But because sweet and cute and cuddly, soft-skinned and lovely to sniff and gorgeous though they are, conferences, workplaces and offices are not the place to bring babies and small children. For they are the ultimate disruptors and they're designed that way so that we can't ignore them – so that we will feed for them, care for them and love them. Which is why when Ms Schonle said on LinkedIn that, 'I was excited to attend, connect, have meetings and contribute', she should have realised that Isadella would have been a gorgeous distraction. Indeed, there's a photo of her posted on Schonle's LinkedIn page at the front doors of Olympia. She's waving, smiling, her beautiful, bright eyes and wispy hair are an audition for a clothing, nappy or soap brand. Everything else in the photo is dull by comparison: suited attendees, the signage and various folk ambling around looking lost. With a baby in tow, how were Schonle or her intended networkers supposed to focus on discussing how Humanvantage AI empowers human excellence through conversational AI-powered role-play? And if she landed new clients on the strength of how gorgeous her baby was, well, that would be unfair and cause chaos. There are reasons we have offices and reasons why, post-Covid, many workers are being told to get back to them.
