Salesforce has won a UK government CRM contract worth up to £2.4 billion including VAT, one of the largest software-as-a-service commitments Britain's tax authority has ever made. The deal runs for at least ten years, to September 2036, with extension options that could carry it to 2041.

HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) selected Salesforce to supply a SaaS CRM platform plus customer and case management, marketing campaigns, messaging, reporting, analytics, and AI. Third parties may supply additional functions, including identity verification, fraud detection, and data integration. The contract award notice shows the competition was narrow: HMRC received two final bids, with Salesforce beating Pegasystems, whose platform also combines low-code development, automation, and AI.

The final number sits well above the department's own early estimate. During preliminary market engagement in April 2025, HMRC sized the procurement at £1 billion. The subsequent tender put its potential 15-year value at £2 billion excluding VAT — £2.4 billion including it. That is a 100 percent increase from the initial figure before tax, and the contract award does not break down what drove the growth.

Integration requirements are explicit in the tender. The new CRM system, HMRC wrote, would need to "seamlessly integrate with [the] updated customer service platforms, including the future Contact Centre as a Service (CCaaS) … directly enhancing taxpayer interactions, streamlining services, and reducing administrative burdens."

That integration has a concrete counterpart. In April, HMRC awarded Capgemini a contact-center-as-a-service contract worth up to £600 million including VAT, also potentially running ten years and designed to connect with the new CRM platform. Together the two agreements — up to £3 billion combined — form a coordinated overhaul of the department's customer-facing technology stack rather than a standalone tooling swap.

The measured context is bleak. In 2025, the House of Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) accused HMRC of deliberately degrading its telephone service to push taxpayers toward online channels. The PAC found phone performance hit an all-time low during 2023-24. In the first 11 months of that financial year, HMRC disconnected nearly 44,000 callers who had spent 70 minutes waiting for an adviser because its system could not cope with demand. Only two-thirds of calls were answered. The average wait exceeded 23 minutes.

An earlier National Audit Office report quantified the backlog more starkly: callers collectively spent 798 years on hold during 2022-23. Those figures are measured outcomes from parliamentary and audit bodies, not vendor projections — and they define the baseline the Salesforce and Capgemini platforms will be judged against.

What remains unmeasured, for now, is delivery. The £2.4 billion ceiling is a maximum, not a committed spend, and the award notice does not publish milestone schedules or performance targets tied to the phone and service metrics that motivated the procurement. Whether a CRM-and-CCaaS pairing can move answer rates and wait times at an agency of HMRC's scale is a question the data will only answer years into the contract — potentially as late as 2041.