Grahame Morris
Main Page: Grahame Morris (Labour - Easington)Department Debates - View all Grahame Morris's debates with the Home Office
HM Passport Office Backlogs
Grahame Morris Excerpts(2 years, 7 months ago)
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Kevin Foster
As I said, we have an additional 500 staff and we are in the process of recruiting another 700. We let people know that the service standard was being pushed out to 10 weeks last April, so we did not hide from the fact that there would be a surge. We are planning to issue an additional 2.5 million passports this year compared with what we normally do as business as usual. A large amount of work has been done and more is being done. Between January and March, we still saw 90% of applications being determined within six weeks.
Grahame Morris (Easington) (Lab)
I thank the staff at the Durham passport office and all the other passport offices for the excellent work they do. I mean no criticism of them; my criticism is of process, of senior managers, and, I am afraid, of the Minister. It is a bit rich the Minister asking those on the Opposition Benches for solutions. I wonder why we are paying him if he cannot come up with them himself. Further to my question at Home Office questions on Monday this week, can he confirm that he has made a decision, and is going to write to me, about the issue of the MP hotline? Again, can we have a direct line to a decision maker in a passport office who has access to all the relevant information and who can actually make decisions, rather than MPs and their staff having to sit for hours waiting on phone lines only to be passed from person to person, speaking to people who are unable to make decisions, answer questions or authorise the printing of passports?
Kevin Foster
While I do not agree with all the hon. Gentleman’s comments, he makes a fair point about the MP hotline, which certainly does need to be better. I am not going to hide from the fact that the performance of the phone lines has been unacceptable, and we need to improve and change that. I thank him for his recognition of the work that the team at the Durham passport office are doing, which has helped to contribute to the record output we saw last month.