Ah hah, I looked into this a bit more since having to use the html editor to add an anchor tag seemed a little odd when you can create hyperlinks with the click of a button. It looks like the anchor button, shown in the youtube video linked in my previous post, dissapeared between Totara 1.1 and Totara 2.2. This was addressed in 2.4 by adding the ability to customise the toolbar for tinymce editors, and the anchor button could be re-added by making these changes.
Site administration > plugins > text editors > TinyMCE HTML editor > General settings > Editor toolbar
Change the line like so:
- bullist,numlist,outdent,indent,|,link,unlink,|,image,nonbreaking,charmap,table,|,code
+bullist,numlist,outdent,indent,|,anchor,link,unlink,|,image,nonbreaking,charmap,table,|,code

More info about that here: http://docs.moodle.org/24/en/Text_editor#Customising_the_editor_toolbar

However you are on 2.2 so this would require a tiny customisation of the code, it's almost exactly the same as the 2.4 setting but in the code, lib/editor/tinymce/lib.php around line 142
- 'theme_advanced_buttons3' => "bullist,numlist,outdent,indent,|,link,unlink,moodlenolink, ...
+'theme_advanced_buttons3' => "bullist,numlist,outdent,indent,|,anchor,link,unlink,moodlenolink, ...

I thought that might be a more satisfactory solution than having to directly edit the html of an item every time.

Cheers
David