Asked by: Mick Whitley (Labour - Birkenhead)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what steps her Department is taking to tackle delays in the (a) processing and (b) issuing of passports.
Answered by Kevin Foster
Due to COVID-19, over 5 million people have delayed applying for a British passport in 2020 and 2021. Since April 2021 British passport applicants have been advised to allow up to ten weeks to get their passport. However, Her Majesty’s Passport Office continues to ensure its customers receive their passport as quickly as possible and has worked alongside its suppliers to develop ways to maximise its ability to cope with and level at unprecedented demand.
HM Passport Office has deployed a range of tried and tested contingency arrangements, which includes the increasing of resources through recruitment and enabling the flexing of resources from across the Home Office and other government departments. In addition, technical solutions, such as its latest application system, mean more passport applications are securely processed with fewer manual interventions to enable them to be processed more quickly.
In March 2022 HMPO decided over a million passport applications, the highest recorded in any month to date.
Asked by: Mick Whitley (Labour - Birkenhead)
Question to the Home Office:
What steps her Department is taking to protect vulnerable children from county lines drugs networks.
Answered by Victoria Atkins - Secretary of State for Health and Social Care
Mr Speaker, with your permission, I would like to group this question with question 31.
We are determined to roll up county lines and protect vulnerable children from this harmful form of exploitation.
Through our £25m county lines programme we have already seen 3,400 people arrested, more than 550 lines closed and more than 770 vulnerable people safeguarded.
We have also increased investment in dedicated one-to-one support for county lines victims and their families.
Asked by: Mick Whitley (Labour - Birkenhead)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what progress the Government has made in meeting commitments under the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme in the last 12 months.
Answered by Chris Philp - Minister of State (Home Office)
As of December 2020, a total of 19,776 people had been resettled to the UK through the Vulnerable Persons Resettlement Scheme (VPRS) since it was expanded in September 2015. This is in addition to the thousands of people resettled through our other refugee resettlement schemes.
In the year to December 2020, a total of 662 people were resettled to the UK through the VPRS. During this time, resettlement activity was necessarily paused, between March 2020 and December 2020, due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.
The Home Office is committed to publishing data in an orderly way as part of the regular quarterly Immigration Statistics, in line with the Code of Practice for Official Statistics. These can be found at www.gov.uk/government/collections/migration-statistics
To access the number of refugees resettled, access the latest statistical release using the link above, then “data tables”, “asylum and resettlement” and select either the summary or detailed resettlement tables. The latest set of figures were released on 25 February 2021.