We’re just being left to sort out things ourselves

HMRC has been forced into a rapid U-turn after revealing plans to shut its self-assessment helpline, and other phone services, for six months of the year.

Such was the public outcry that people would be left at the mercy of an online bot that the brakes were slammed on proposals to allow time for more ‘discussion’.

Chief exec Jim Harra said it recognised more needed to be done to ensure taxpayers’ needs are met while ‘encouraging them to transition to online services’.

In the self-service age, HMRC’S suggestion is perhaps not surprising, but could the peasants in DIY Britain be about to revolt?

From organising your tax affairs, scanning your weekly food shop, treating your illnesses, checking yourself onto a flight, ordering your evening meal in a restaurant or accessing your tickets to a theatre show or concert – most of these jobs now require us to go it alone.

Few tasks are safe in this new self-sufficient society we’ve slipped into where ‘print at home’ and ‘scan the QR code’ are often code for ‘sort it out yourself’.

What next? Taking our own rubbish to the tip instead of a dustcart’s weekly collection?

If this was indeed to save us all a few bob maybe I’d be more here for it – but the disappointing reality is that palming jobs off on the population is to just paper over the cracks in our once fully-functioning society. Take the NHS for example. Messages this week are urging patients to organise their repeat prescriptions ahead of Easter – not to mention the constant reminder that if we’re feeling under the weather we must consider whether a pharmacy can help before daring to ring the GP.

Even radio adverts now guide parents through judging their children’s cough and cold symptoms and whether they’re well enough to attend school.

Once upon a time, it’d be the sort of reassuring question you’d run past your GP while they examined your sick kid, listened to their chest, or looked in their ears, but now we follow a flow chart of yes/no questions and must reach these conclusions ourselves.

At the end of last year plans to close thousands of rail ticket offices had to be scrapped following a huge public backlash. Refusing to be left at the mercy of machines, websites and apps – close to 750,000 people revolted and demanded that station offices stay.

Between that – and this month’s pushback at HMRC – could our appetite for taking every matter into our own hands be waning?