Passport Applications

Baroness Primarolo Excerpts

Wednesday 18th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. I seek your guidance. The Home Secretary has made it clear to Opposition Members who have intervened—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. This sounds very much like a continuation of the debate. I hope that it is not.

[Huw Irranca-Davies]

No, it is not, Madam Deputy Speaker. I am seeking clarification from you. Opposition Members have been told that if they have a problem with an individual case, they should pursue it through the MPs helpline or the usual channels, but it was made clear in a response to a similar intervention by a Government Member that the Immigration Minister had been contacted directly. I ask for your support, Madam Deputy Speaker. As someone who speaks up for all the representatives in the House, do you agree that the same facility should be afforded to all Members, regardless of political party?

[Madam Deputy Speaker]

The Home Secretary has heard that point very clearly, and I am sure that, given the chance, she will deal with it directly so that the position is clear to Members.

[Mrs May]

Opposition Members have indeed been getting in touch with the Immigration Minister. The Chairman of the Home Affairs Committee, the right hon. Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz), texted me on Saturday, and I was able to ensure that someone from the Passport Office—[Interruption.] I hear some complaints from behind me from colleagues who are not able to text because they do not have my number.

--- Later in debate ---

[Sir Gerald Kaufman (Manchester, Gorton) (Lab)]

On a point of order, Madam Deputy Speaker. This is a strictly time-limited debate. The speeches of the two Front-Bench spokesmen have taken between them an hour and 26 minutes, and one reason for that is the acceptance of intervention after intervention after intervention from Members, many of whom have left the Chamber without bothering to listen to the rest of the debate. The consequence of that is that the rest of us have only six minutes, in which it is impossible to develop any kind of coherent or articulate argument. When will this be put right?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)]

Sir Gerald, that point of order has just taken more time from the debate. As you will know, how long Front-Bench spokesmen take to open the debate is not a matter for the Chair. This is a time-limited debate, and we now do not have enough time for every speaker who wishes to contribute.

I agree, Sir Gerald, with your point with regard to interventions being made by Members who then leave the Chamber. The convention is quite clear. Those Members should have stayed, at least until the Home Secretary sat down. I have drawn this to the attention of the Whips, and I hope that those Members will be told that interventions take other speakers’ time.

We have a six-minute time limit. We will start with six minutes. Not every Member will get in if it remains at six minutes, so I will have to review it. Some Members may decide to withdraw their names; let us wait and see.

--- Later in debate ---

[Yvette Cooper]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman has sat down. He has run out of time. I am reducing the time limit to five minutes in order to ensure that all Members can speak in the debate. I hope that it will not be necessary to reduce it further, but this is a time-limited debate. I call Mr Geoffrey Robinson.

[Mr Geoffrey Robinson (Coventry North West) (Lab)]

Thank you, Madam Deputy Speaker. I congratulate you on your honour.

The Government are evading two fundamental questions, and if we do not get answers to them today, we shall go on pressing for them, because we are rightly being relentlessly pursued for answers by our constituents. The first question is: why are we in this crisis, and why is there such a shambles in the Department? We have not had an answer from the Government that makes any sense. They have tried to blame the massive increase on new people applying for passports, but their figures do not show that to be the case.

I have written a letter to the Minister for Security and Immigration, the hon. Member for Old Bexley and Sidcup (James Brokenshire), but he has not yet replied to it. I have not even had an acknowledgement, let alone an invitation to meet him. I have been received by many of his predecessors, as has my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman), who has referred to Mr Waddington in particular. Those Ministers met constituents when there was a problem. That course of action worked well, and I would recommend it to the Minister who is now in charge, even though he does not seem to be terribly interested in what I am saying.

The Government have increased the manpower. The crisis blew up during the January to May period and the Home Secretary has stood at the Dispatch Box and announced crisis measures to deal with it. What remains unclear is whether holidays for which flights and hotels have been booked will qualify as urgent business. I have not heard a clear answer from the Government on that yet.

This takes me to the main question. The Government have said that they are sorry, but if they say sorry, they have to mean it. Saying sorry means making amends; otherwise, it does not mean anything. It is just a word without a meaning. The Home Secretary has evaded the question three times when we have put it to her, but the Government must tell us what they are going to do in the cases where our constituents had done everything correctly and HMPO was at fault, resulting in them not getting their passports in time. Many of those people have lost money just trying to get their passports, never mind losing money on holiday bookings. The Government have to give us an answer to that question.

We need to know who took the decision to bring all the overseas passport work into the Department at the very time we were having a seasonal surge. I think it must have been the Home Secretary because she went out of her way to defend it today. However, she could not give us the basic statistics. If the relevant figure is 6% of 3.3 million, that equates to about 175,000, which is a good half of the 350,000 extra cases that came in this year. So it was clearly a bad—indeed, almost idiotic—management decision to take in the overseas passport work at that time.

I want to mention the case of Mrs Joanna Hughes. She applied online on 23 April to renew her daughter Ella’s passport, which she would need for a trip to Belgium for the world war one centenary celebrations on 19 June. The Passport Office advised her that the application would take up to three weeks to complete. About three weeks later, on 10 May, she received a letter from HMPO to tell her that the passport and photos had been lost within the passport department. It advised her to forward a new application form and photographs, which she did on 12 May. There was no delay there; she got on to it straight away. She sent the documents to the Glasgow priority handling office via Royal Mail special delivery. She told me:

“I finally received a call back on 29 May to be told that my application was with an examiner in Belfast, not Glasgow as previously advised.”

We can already see that there was a muddle in the department. There were a lot of people working on the application, but if there is criticism to be made, it is not of the people working on the process but of the organisation, of the ministerial decisions and of Mr Pugh himself. The problem lies with the organisation of the department itself.

Mrs Hughes continued:

“I was advised to send a Lost and Stolen form with a covering letter to Priority Handling Belfast which I had to download online to advise the very department who had lost the passport! Another special delivery was posted that day.”

I agree with her conclusion:

“I would like to receive a full apology and investigation into why my daughter’s old passport and photos were lost in a Government office and I want to receive full compensation for all the further expenditure I have had to make”.

She gives details of the expenditure, which comes to the best part of £153. The Government are responsible for that. What are they going to do—

[Madam Deputy Speaker (Dame Dawn Primarolo)]

Order. The hon. Gentleman’s time is up.