call back

The extraordinary part came five minutes after they hung up, when Yates’ father called back.

This was because HMRC's system could not cope with the volume of calls, but customers were not warned they were about to be cut off, nor were they called back, the report added.

The agency had worked the wait down to an average of less than 13 minutes, in part by encouraging customers to wait off the line for a call back.

"There is a plan to call back the contractors to clean those areas to specification, to standard," Boniface Dumpe, a director at the BMI, told the BBC.

Ward breathed a sigh of relief, then called back the staff from MonteCedro to share their whereabouts.