HM Passport Office Backlogs

Anne McLaughlin Excerpts

Wednesday 27th April 2022 Commons Chamber

[Kevin Foster]

Just to be clear, a range of private contractors are already involved in the passport process. The bit that is not undertaken by a private contractor is the decision itself. The customer advice line is run by Teleperformance, a private company. As I have already described, its performance is unacceptable and we are engaged with it.

There is already quite extensive use of the private sector in the process. To be fair, Thales and others have stepped up in the record output that we now require, which is far beyond what would have been expected in a month two or three years ago. The private sector is already being used in the vast majority of the processes in the Passport Office.

[Anne McLaughlin (Glasgow North East) (SNP)]

Like many other Members, I have constituents and family members who have lost a lot of money and had to cancel plans because of the passport delays. I share the concerns for those people, but I want to talk about the workers who, yet again, are about to be blamed.

It is a thankless task to work for a Government agency at the best of times but—worse—they are now being blamed for the Government’s failings. Could it be that they are under-resourced, understaffed and suffering from stress from the pressure to do more faster? In Glasgow, many passport staff were forced into further stress when they were redeployed to process universal credit claims with just five days’ training when it would normally be six weeks’ training. Could that be part of the reason for the backlog? It is certainly another source of stress for them.

Those same workers face the public’s understandable anger, but it is being directed at the wrong place. The Government are throwing them to the wolves: Ministers are leaving notes on desks suggesting workers should work a little harder—and that from a Minister who is known to lie down on the Benches in this place when he is supposed to be at work—and, although I do not have the exact quote, the Prime Minister said something like, “If they don’t sort out this backlog, I will privatise the Boris out of them.” How did that go with rail, energy and water? Is that the plan? Was it the plan all along? Is that why the Government did not foresee this? The Opposition cannot be expected to foresee these things—[Interruption.] I hear coughing; I had better ask my last question. Is there any chance that we can simply respect workers by increasing capacity, decreasing threats against them and sorting out this sorry mess for everybody?

[Kevin Foster]

I start on a point of consensus by thanking the many staff who are working hard and saw a record output last month. It was 13% higher than the previous record, so we are talking about it beating that record not by one but by some distance. As I said, there are 500 extra staff and we are in the process of recruiting more; between January and March, 90% of applications were dealt with within six weeks; and support is there.

The redeployment that the hon. Lady mentioned took place at a time when passport demand was significantly down. It made sense to redeploy people away from a role where there was not the demand and on to things such as universal credit and the EU settlement scheme. To be clear, those staff have now fully returned to passport production, and on 1 April more than 4,000 staff were working on it. Yes, there are issues, particularly in relation to the unacceptable performance of the advice line, which is run by a private contractor, as I have already touched on.

We continue to put in place a range of measures. If people are to travel somewhere, we advise them to get their applications in now. We saw a strong level of applications yesterday. We continue to do the work we need to do and to expedite those cases in which people have compelling and compassionate reasons for travelling.