HM Passport Office Backlog

Debate between Holly Lynch and Alex Sobel

Tuesday 14th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

Like every other MP who has spoken in the debate and, I suspect, every other MP across the Benches, I have an inbox and postbag full of Passport Office delays. We opened 30 cases last month, as the target for passport processing has slid to 10 weeks.

To share some further examples from my Halifax constituency, we have been working with a family who made an application on 17 March for the renewal of a child’s passport for a holiday on 30 May. We chased multiple times and escalated the case as the holiday got closer. The passport was finally processed and arrived the day before their holiday. However, the Passport Office made a spelling mistake in the child’s name, despite its having been spelled correctly by his parents on all the forms. It took that family more than 10 weeks to get the passport, and when it arrived it was wrong. They had no choice but to cancel their family holiday.

Another family applied for the passports of both their son and daughter to be renewed at the same time, with exactly the same information provided for both, other than their names, dates of birth and genders. Remarkably, the son’s application was processed immediately and arrived two weeks later. The daughter’s, however, is still ongoing, with the Passport Office continuing to raise new issues with it. First it queried the mother’s parental responsibility; then it said the referee who had countersigned the passport was not eligible to do so. Those may well be legitimate queries, but the information being questioned was exactly the same information provided for her brother’s passport, which was processed in two weeks. We are in a position where the process cannot be right, which prompts the question: why the inconsistency? Where is the oversight?

A third family applied for their daughter’s passport six weeks before she turned 16. They sought advice, given that if someone is within three weeks of turning 16 they are advised to apply for an adult passport. However, the Passport Office advised them to still apply for a child’s passport. Unsurprisingly, they have now been told she needs to apply for an adult passport and the family need to start the application process again, with their family holiday now imminent and hanging in the balance.

We have heard too many such cases in the Chamber today. My hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Mary Kelly Foy) spoke of exhausted staff of Her Majesty’s Passport Office having to witness threats of self-harm from a member of the public who was desperate for a passport. I thank her for her dedication and for being such a powerful advocate for those staff today.

My hon. Friend the Member for Blaenau Gwent (Nick Smith) told heartbreaking stories of lost holidays that his constituents had shared with him. My hon. Friend the Member for Vauxhall (Florence Eshalomi) told the story of her constituent Tom, who has endured various problems, setbacks and issues in applying for a passport for his six-year-old son. My hon. Friend the Member for Weaver Vale (Mike Amesbury) highlighted the challenges in just getting access to the data that we would all so like to see, including the answer to the big question—the size of the backlog.

My hon. Friend the Member for Newport East (Jessica Morden), who is a brilliant champion of her constituents, spoke of the local campaign she was involved with to retain her local passport office, working alongside the PCS union. She also spoke powerfully, as others have done, of the impact on children in particular of not knowing whether their family holidays will go ahead as planned, or will ultimately have to be cancelled at very short notice.

I pay tribute to my hon. Friend and neighbour the Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain), who spoke of this not being the only crisis in the Home Office. I am afraid the crisis in political leadership and its lack of compassion is making for an agonising time for anyone who needs Home Office services. My hon. Friend the Member for Blackburn (Kate Hollern) spoke of a family who had to pay £1,000 to change the date of their holiday.

My hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby) reminded us that there are so many different reasons why people need to travel, and told some particularly heartbreaking stories. My hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Tahir Ali) spoke of his constituents who had been unable to attend the funerals of loved ones—an utterly heartbreaking position to be in.

My hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Mohammad Yasin) again spoke of people’s missing family funerals and significant family events, not for public health reasons, but for admin reasons, which has had a devastating impact on his constituents. My hon. Friend the Member for Merthyr Tydfil and Rhymney (Gerald Jones) spoke of the Prime Minister’s claim that everybody is getting their passports within six weeks—an utter nonsense, when we have all shared constituency stories from our caseloads. Last but by no means least, my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Ruth Jones) spoke about the predictability of the surge in demand and asked why we were not prepared for it.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is telling the stories of so many of our hon. Friends. I could not be here earlier in the debate, but I want to share a story from my constituency. Many of my constituents are frequent business travellers or academics. They cannot release their passport for 10 weeks. Many of them have been trying to get a one-week appointment online so that they can go in person and sort it out, but those appointments are not available online; nobody can get them, even though they cost double what a normal passport does. Is that not also a massive issue for frequent travellers?

[Holly Lynch]

My hon. Friend makes an important point, speaking to the variety of reasons why people have to unlock this backlog, whether for work or personal reasons. There are economic reasons why we must get productivity up and have people able to travel again, alongside the family connections that we need to see re-established and people’s ability to undertake holidays once again.

As the Minister for migration is back in his place, I must say that I am grateful for the occasions when I have been able to reach out to him and he has intervened on cases where I have made an appeal directly to him. However, I am privileged in that I have his mobile number; what we are trying to get to is a position where—[Interruption.] For purely professional reasons, for anyone who made an odd noise there. We are trying to get to a process whereby a constituent out there would not need to have access to the Minister’s mobile number in order to have their case resolved by this Home Office.

At a time when the cost of living crisis is hitting the country hard and after two years of family holidays having to be postponed and rearranged, Home Office incompetence is landing British families with yet more unnecessary costs as they pick up the tab for the failures and pay for fast-track passport services, or face losing hundreds of pounds in cancelled holidays. The number of monthly fast-track applications has more than doubled since December 2021, as other colleagues have said. In April this year alone, British families spent at least £5.4 million on fast-track services.

The Passport Office’s own forecasts show that it expects to receive more than 240,000 fast-track applications between May and October this year, at a cost of an incredible £34 million. The cost of passport failure is being passed on to families stuck between a rock and a hard place, at the worst possible time. Even the fast-track service, as we have just heard, is not always a guarantee, with the website often saying that there is no availability of appointments due to high demand. My constituents report that they are calling day after day with no success. One constituent emailed:

“Another stressful day has passed of getting no answers from the passport office. It’s nothing but incorrect information and false hope. I’ve arranged 3 call backs, one of them being from the upgrade team and not one of them have got back to me. I’m due to travel next Friday, and I have no hope whatsoever.”

The trade union PCS says that the Home Office originally estimated that 1,700 new staff members would be needed to deal with the backlog, but as far as we are aware—and we have had confirmation of this—only about 500 have actually been recruited. I would be grateful if the Minister confirmed the timeline for when those additional staff members will be joining their colleagues on the frontline.

In April, the Prime Minister reportedly said that he wanted to privatise the Passport Office, using more unparliamentary language than I have at the Dispatch Box. However, the Minister has confirmed to the House that most of the services within the process have already been privatised, with in-house staff dealing only with decisions on applications themselves. I suspect that it will come as a surprise to precisely no one to hear that the Prime Minister is not across the detail on this, but what does he think is left to privatise, and how exactly, based on the performance of the existing contractors, does he think it will improve the service? Looking at the three private service providers involved in passports, freedom of information requests published by the Mirror last month revealed that TNT, as the courier service for the Passport Office, has lost hundreds of passports and documents in the past two years despite applications being lower due to the pandemic, with 519 lost items in 2020 and a staggering 1,196 in the first seven months of 2021. This £77 million three-year contract was awarded in July 2019 and is due to be reconsidered this summer, so how do the Government propose to transform the courier service?

Sopra Steria, which provides frontline and support services including scanning, uploading and storage of documents, has its own backlogs, with PCS estimating that by April 500,000 applications completed by customers were awaiting opening and scanning on to Sopra Steria’s system. As we have heard, the performance of Teleperformance, which operates the helpline, has already been deemed unacceptable by Ministers. So how exactly does the Prime Minister think that to simply repeat the words “privatise it” is fixing a broken system that is already largely privatised?

Another constituent who got in touch shared their utter frustration:

“We got married on the 7th May after postponing 3 times. I applied for an urgent upgrade a week ago as I travel a week today and I’ve still not had a phone call back to make the payment and begin fast track. I have less than a week to get my passport to go on my honeymoon. I applied with plenty of time and also applied for the urgent upgrade.”

Another said:

“This issue has caused me and my family a great deal of distress, expense and now we are potentially looking at having to cancel our holiday, losing a significant amount of money.”

This Government are presiding over backlog Britain. If it is not passports, it is drivers’ licences, NHS waiting times, court dates, charging decisions, asylum decisions, housing waiting lists and Ukraine visas—and the list goes on. People cannot be expected to find the additional cash needed to bypass Home Office failure. They deserve better. This Government must apologise and find a way of delivering better.

English for Speakers of Other Languages

Debate between Holly Lynch and Alex Sobel

Wednesday 3rd July 2019 Westminster Hall

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under you, Ms Dorries. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Birmingham, Edgbaston (Preet Kaur Gill) not only for securing this debate, but for her incredibly insightful opening speech, in which she very articulately made the case for ESOL funding.

Only a week ago, I had the pleasure of showing a group of ESOL learners from Halifax around Westminster, as part of a trip organised by Halifax Opportunities Trust to complement their studies. They were a wonderful group of people, each with a different story to tell, but all of them enthusiastic about the opportunity to gain a better understanding of their adopted Parliament, how it works and its relationship to their lives. While they are still studying English, it was their ability to ask questions and understand the answers that empowered them to truly experience Parliament as participants, rather than simply as observers along for the ride.

However, although almost everyone understands the value of being able to speak English, ESOL provision is harder to access than ever before. As we have heard, Government funding for ESOL in England fell from £212.3 million in 2008 to £105 million in 2018—a real-terms cut of almost 60%. Unsurprisingly, Calderdale College in my constituency has had to reduce its ESOL provision by 50%, despite an increase in the number of learners seeking it. We expect the publication of the national ESOL strategy in the autumn. With YouGov polling suggesting that 91% of the British public believe it important that refugees and others who come to the UK should learn to speak English, we know that there is overwhelming support for investment in ESOL as a means for that to happen.

Here in Westminster, I vice-chair the all-party parliamentary group on social integration, which the hon. Member for Henley (John Howell) mentioned. In 2017, we published our “Integration not Demonisation” report, which argued that the ability to speak English is one of the key principles underpinning healthy and successful integration within communities. As part of the call for evidence for that report, it was a pleasure to welcome the all-party parliamentary group to Halifax, where the chair and I met with those involved in integration work.

Office for National Statistics research published in the report suggests that approximately 800,000 people living in the UK at the time of the 2011 census could not speak English—2% of the population. In some areas with large numbers of immigrants, including Newham, Brent, Tower Hamlets and Leicester, that can be as high as 9% of the population. Further to this, 22% of Muslim women in the UK self-report that they are unable to speak English well.

To address that, the report recommended that the Government should introduce a national strategy for the promotion of English language learning, which would unleash the economic potential of immigrants, enabling newcomers to participate fully in British life and ensuring that everyone in our society can benefit from meeting and mixing with others from different cultures. We went so far as to say that enrolment in English language classes should be compulsory, acknowledging the Casey review findings that, in some communities, regressive cultural and family norms and practices can prevent the most vulnerable from learning English.

We also asserted that the ability to learn English should be a right extended to everyone. We argued that, while the Department for Education should lead that work, it should be delivered with input from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy and other relevant Departments to ensure that it was as effective as possible.

[Alex Sobel (Leeds North West) (Lab/Co-op)]

My hon. Friend is making an excellent speech and a lot of good points. The Government found £10 million in 2016 for Syrian refugees to undertake ESOL classes. If there is money for Syrian refugees, surely there is money for all the communities that need it.

[Holly Lynch]

My hon. Friend makes the important point that we recognised the importance of Syrian refugees being able to speak English, but we have not delivered the funding to extend that programme to other newcomers to our country. We should reflect on that.

Ahead of the publication of the national ESOL strategy in the autumn, I was glad to see that the Government’s immigration White Paper, published in December last year, commits to

“an ambitious and well-funded English language strategy to ensure that everyone in this country, especially those with newly recognised refugee status, are supported to speak the same language.”

However, these proposals contain no new funding for English language teaching, which the strategy will have to address later this year. The ability to speak English is important for many reasons, not least, as I have mentioned, because it is integral to integration. If someone cannot speak English, their ability to find work, meet and converse with people and access everyday services is severely restricted. For someone to be trapped in a world where they cannot interact with those around them will leave them desperately isolated and vulnerable.

There is strong public support for ESOL, not least because it would be a sensible investment. Research undertaken by Refugee Action—I am pleased to see members of the team in the Gallery—shows that it would cost £42 million a year to ensure two years’ ESOL for each refugee arriving in the UK, which would in effect be fully reimbursed to the taxpayer within the first eight months of that individual’s employment at the national average wage.

The Casey review looked at opportunity and integration. Published in December 2016, it made it clear that good English skills are fundamental to integrated communities and particularly important as a means of empowering marginalised women and other socially isolated groups. However, when it comes to working with those groups in particular, as much as I welcome learning in the community, I am sympathetic to some of the points already made about how effective learning in the community needs to be. I have seen good examples of that and I have seen bad examples.

The Women’s Activity Centre in Halifax, which does a great deal to support older, isolated women, predominantly from the Kashmiri community, for whom the inability to speak English is a significant contributor to loneliness and isolation, was approached by an organisation that offered to come in and deliver ESOL. The organisation came in, signed everyone up, took some photos and then brought in an eastern European interpreter who unfortunately could not communicate with that specific group of learners at all. After two lessons, on realising that this approach was futile, they failed to return, letting all those women down. When funding for ESOL is so precious, knowing that dedicated funds can be wasted in that way, delivering no social benefit to those who most need it, is painful for everyone involved.

I have been working closely with Sisters United in Halifax—truly inspirational women who are working alongside Refugee Action to support its “Let Refugees Learn” campaign. Refugee Action has called for refugees to have a minimum of eight hours formal, accredited tuition a week for their first two years in the UK, which, as I have mentioned, would cost £42 million a year, although that would be repaid within the first eight months of a refugee’s being in work. Alongside this, I lend my support to Refugee Action’s “Lift the Ban” campaign, which seeks to promote integration and facilitate opportunities to improve language skills by allowing refugees to work while awaiting a decision on their status.

ESOL provision represents value for money. We know that the demand is there, but at the moment the provision is not. If we are looking for ways of ensuring, now more than ever, that we foster healthy, integrated communities, investing in ESOL would be a really constructive way of supporting those aims.