Oral Answers to Questions

Patricia Gibson Excerpts

Monday 20th June 2022 Commons Chamber

[Deidre Brock (Edinburgh North and Leith) (SNP)]

12. How many and what proportion of passport applications that were received over 10 weeks ago have not yet been processed.

[Patricia Gibson (North Ayrshire and Arran) (SNP)]

17. How many and what proportion of passport applications that were received over 10 weeks ago have not yet been processed.

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Kevin Foster)]

Across March, April and May, Her Majesty’s Passport Office completed the processing of approximately 3 million passport applications, with 98.5% of those from the UK being completed within the published processing time of up to 10 weeks.

--- Later in debate ---

[Patricia Gibson]

Civil servants working in the Passport Office are under huge pressure, and staff morale is reported to be understandably at an all-time low, owing to a lack of Government preparation for the up to 9 million passport applications or renewals expected following lockdown. Meanwhile, my constituents face intolerable delays and the prospect of missing much-needed holidays and family events. We have been promised repeatedly in this Chamber that things will improve, but the 10-week target continues to be too often missed. How much longer must we wait for passport offices to be fully staffed and resourced, so that my constituents are not subjected to yet another aspect of Backlog Britain?

[Kevin Foster]

Dearie me! In fact, we have been increasing the number of staff at the Passport Office rather than reducing it as the hon. Lady has implied. We have dealt with 3 million applications in three months, and soon we will have dealt with more in six months than we did in the whole of last year. It was fairly obvious that 5 million passports had not been renewed during the pandemic, and we started to plan for this last year. In April 2021, we changed and clarified the service standard and began preparations to deal with the surge. We hear these attacks from Opposition Members, but what we never hear from them is an idea.