Keith Vaz
Main Page: Keith Vaz (Labour - Leicester East)Department Debates - View all Keith Vaz's debates with the Home Office
(10 years, 5 months ago)
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Yvette Cooper
I hope the management and work force can work together. It is helpful that the union has shown support to sort the problem out and get things done in time.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
The Home Affairs Committee was very surprised when we heard that the amount of work in progress was 493,000, because we have not yet reached the peak of the application period. However, we were even more surprised when no timetable was given. The chief executive said it would be done in a reasonable time. When we asked him what a reasonable time was, he said, “How long is a piece of string?” We need a timetable to get work in progress quickly.
Yvette Cooper
The Home Affairs Committee work in taking evidence has been important, because my right hon. Friend is exactly right that we need a time scale. We need to know how long this piece of string is. Is it a short piece of string or a long one? Are we talking about a few weeks or a few months, or about this time next year? People who have holidays in September or business trips in October need to know how far in advance they should plan and whether they should be worried. Ministers are not giving us answers on how long it will take.
The Home Secretary has said that there will be 650 extra staff on the telephone helpline, which means more extra staff for the helpline than for clearing passports. How much does she think that will help? Currently, most people’s experience of the helpline is that people take messages and promise that someone else will call back. The person who is supposed to call back does not do so, and the people on the helpline do not know the answers.
That system is doing people’s heads in. We heard from Ria Runsewe and her family in Bromley. On 5 May, they applied for a passport for their 10-week-old son, and then heard nothing. She said:
“I called the helpline to check its progress…I was told someone would call me back within 48 hours, but I missed the call while I was changing my son’s nappy. Ten minutes later, I called back—only to be told that I had gone to the bottom of the queue and would have to wait another 48 hours.”
She eventually got through to someone and asked to upgrade to the premium service, and spent two more weeks chasing before someone else called her back to take payment and promise that the passport would be there the following day.
Another family gave us this account of their conversation on the helpline. Passport Office: “We can’t guarantee when your passport will be sent or when you will receive it.” Me: “What can I do?” Him: “You can’t do anything?” Me: “Can’t I pay to upgrade?” Him: “We can’t talk about that. You have to ring another number.” Me: “But that is your number.” Him: “We can’t talk about it until you mention it.” Me: “Okay. I’m mentioning it, and, in fact, I can categorically say I want it.” Him: “We can’t guarantee that they will do anything and they may not respond to you, but you can apply again for an urgent upgrade after that, and you may be lucky that time.” That is not even Kafkaesque; it is Monty Python. We do not need a system that simply has more staff to take messages. We need staff in place to clear passports and ensure that constituents throughout the country are told what is going on.
Keith Vaz (Leicester East) (Lab)
The former Minister for Immigration, the hon. Member for Forest of Dean (Mr Harper), described the passport service as gold-plated, but it has gone from being a swan to an ugly duckling in just 12 months. After the Home Affairs Committee took evidence from the chief executive of the Passport Office, there is no denying that there is a crisis. I welcome what the Home Secretary has done during the last seven days. These are important measures that I hope will alleviate the real distress that many of our constituents have suffered during the last few months. I wish those measures had been put in place much earlier, but it is far too early to judge what Ministers did or did not do at the relevant time. Suffice it to say that it is important that we deal with the crisis as quickly as possible.
The Home Secretary is right: 493,289 cases represent work in progress. But the word “backlog” is used quite a lot. One of the problems is that those in the Home Office regard a backlog as being everything outside service standard times. They also define a service standard time. For many years, the Home Affairs Committee, in our reports, has not accepted the use of that phrase. We have looked at the amount of work in progress; what the public want is to be able to submit a passport application, pay a fee and get good value for money. We should not have to praise the Passport Office and say it is doing a good job because we can ring to have complaints dealt with. Frankly, that is what it should be doing all the time.
We must remind ourselves, Madam Deputy Speaker—I congratulate you on your appointment as a dame—that we should not need to wait for facts and figures. I want to spend the very short time that I have, which is getting even shorter, on the evidence given by the chief executive of the Passport Office. I was hugely disappointed by what Mr Paul Pugh had to say; he is, after all, being paid more than the Minister for Security and Immigration. I would have expected the chief executive of an agency of the Crown to be able to judge the huge increase in passport applications that began earlier this year.
The Select Committee asked for the facts and figures that the Home Secretary was unable to give us today—she clearly does not have them all with her—to be delivered to it before the evidence session. At 2.45 yesterday afternoon, when the session began, and by implication the entire staff would have been present at the hearing, we received an e-mail saying that the figures had not been verified. These are normal statistics that should be on the desk of Ministers every week.
It is a long time since I have been a Minister, but when I had responsibility for entry clearance, I demanded on a weekly basis the number of cases that were going to appeal, partly because of the letters I received from my right hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman), to make sure that the backlog was brought to a conclusion as quickly as possible.
The Home Secretary was right to visit Peterborough. I visited the Passport Office in London last Friday and I agree with her—there are some extremely hard-working staff there who are putting in a lot of hours. Many of them are working overtime, but many are very new. Of the four members of staff I spoke to on reception at Globe house, all had been appointed in the past fortnight. I am not sure whether they have the necessary training. They were all very pleasant and courteous and were doing their best, but it looks a bit like management by panic, as my hon. Friend the Member for Newport West (Paul Flynn) said yesterday during the session. We do not expect that of an agency with the kind of reputation that the Passport Office has.
Keith Vaz
I will not, as time is short.
I, too, have had to contact the Home Office over urgent cases. I rang the Home Secretary’s Parliamentary Private Secretary, the hon. Member for Meon Valley (George Hollingbery), a second after I rang the head of the Passport Office on Saturday. The hon. Gentleman was obviously on constituency business. I do not blame him; he is always good at returning my calls. I then texted the Home Secretary to tell her that I had a constituent outside Durham who was not able to get a passport to catch a plane. She responded. I have been offered money for her phone number, but I am not giving it away. I am keeping it to myself in case I need it again.
We should not have to ring the Home Secretary to get these things done. They should be done by the chief executive of the agency, and he should be able to complete his work properly. I commend the work of his private office. When we have raised cases, the staff there have been very good, Farooq Belai in particular, and so has the Home Secretary’s own private secretary, Alison Samedi.
The matter rests with Mr Pugh. I think my hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Mr Mudie) said sorry is an easy word. Sir Elton John said, “Sorry seems to be the hardest word”. It took Mr Pugh three attempts to say sorry. Enough of apologies. Let us get on with a clear timetable and let us restore the issuing of passports in the posts abroad as the best way of dealing with the problem.
Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)
We have had a very useful debate today. I echo many right hon. and hon. Members across the House in thanking the hard-pressed Passport Office staff, the people working on the helpline and, dare I say, the Minister’s office for the efforts that they are making for constituents who have received their passports following the interventions of Members of Parliament. My hon. Friend the Member for Airdrie and Shotts (Pamela Nash)—and my hon. Friend the Member for City of Durham (Roberta Blackman-Woods), who has a passport office in her constituency—have made that point. Indeed, the hon. Member for Stevenage (Stephen McPartland) also made that point, although I cannot compete with him in making my own passport as he said he did in a former career. He would probably need a passport to go back to Liverpool now, given his current political affiliations.
I have no quibble with the hard work, dedication or efforts of passport staff, especially on last-minute cases, to ensure that people have their holidays. But I must echo the point made by my hon. Friend the Member for Cardiff South and Penarth (Stephen Doughty) when he said that constituents should not have to involve Members of Parliament to get their passports on time. People are paying for the service, which made a £73 million surplus last year. The hon. Member for Northampton North (Michael Ellis), who is no longer in his place, was in denial about the impact of the problems on constituents across the country.
Clearly, despite the efforts of the staff, there is something wrong with the delivery of passport services at the moment. The motion makes three points. First, it expresses the frustration of Members of Parliament about the experiences of their constituents who have applied for passports, including lengthy delays and the consequential cancellation of holidays, business trips and visits. My hon. Friend the Member for Leeds East (Mr Mudie) made great play of his concerns about the number of individuals he has had to deal with.
Secondly, the motion points out how the Government have failed to plan properly to meet the level of demand this year. Thirdly, and crucially, it calls on the Government to expand their emergency measures and to look at compensating passport applicants who have had to pay for urgent upgrades. I shall consider each issue in turn to scrutinise the Government’s record.
Keith Vaz
We have yet another Sedwill review, and the last one resulted in the abolition of the UK Border Agency. Does my right hon. Friend agree that we should review the decision taken by Ministers to stop applications being made abroad? It is time to look again at that decision and allow people to make applications by post.
Mr Hanson
I know that my right hon. Friend’s Committee looked at these issues yesterday. I understand the reasons behind that decision—Ministers are concerned about consistency and security—but we need to review whether those are concerns in all cases. We also need to review the procedures that have been used to repatriate the process, because they have not worked, in my view. There were discussions yesterday and today about the issue, and I would welcome the Minister’s comments.
As my hon. Friend the Member for Inverclyde (Mr McKenzie) said, the passport website still has a three-week web promise for passport delivery. I would like to know from the Minister whether that is still the norm for delivery of passports. Will the Minister commit today to maintaining the three-week delivery time? The Passport Office chief executive has said that we had a 16% under-forecast of demand. We initially thought that the extra demand was 350,000 applications, but the chief executive confirmed yesterday—in response to my right hon. Friend the Member for Leicester East (Keith Vaz)—that it is 400,000. The Passport Office has now ordered an independent review of forecasting. Yesterday, the chief executive said that 493,289 passport applications were “in progress”. The Home Office does not use the words “delay” or “backlog”: everything is “work in progress”.
My right hon. Friend the Member for Normanton, Pontefract and Castleford (Yvette Cooper) tested the Home Secretary on the figures before the House today. The Home Secretary said that applications this year are 3.3 million, up from 2.95 million last year—an increase of 350,000. She also said that 6% of the 3.3 million applications were from overseas, and that is 200,000 applications. Last year, those 200,000 applications were dealt with by the Foreign Office, so—as my right hon. Friend said—200,000 of the 350,000 increase came from overseas. I hope that the Minister will tell us what has caused the increase in demand.
My hon. Friend the Member for Coventry North West (Mr Robinson) asked that question. Is it because of the repatriation of dealing with overseas residents’ passports—about which my hon. Friend the Member for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Sandra Osborne) asked pertinent questions at the Foreign Affairs Committee hearing—or is it because of the closure of offices at home, a point raised my hon. Friends the Members for Newport West (Paul Flynn), for Newport East (Jessica Morden) and for North Ayrshire and Arran (Katy Clark)? Is it because, even today, there are not sufficient staff to deal with current needs, or is it because, in some twilight world—as the hon. Member for Salisbury (John Glen) said—the bright economic future has led people to book their holidays early? Only yesterday, the annual figures showed that inflation outstripped wages yet again. People’s earnings are not keeping pace with inflation.
Keith Vaz
I appreciate that he was not the Immigration Minister when the decision to close the overseas posts were made, nor was he the Minister earlier this year. However, when was he told personally by Mr Pugh that there would be a problem with the number of applications and does he still have confidence in the chief executive of the agency?