Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi
Main Page: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)Department Debates - View all Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi's debates with the Home Office
(2 years, 7 months ago)
Commons ChamberUrgent Questions are proposed each morning by backbench MPs, and up to two may be selected each day by the Speaker. Chosen Urgent Questions are announced 30 minutes before Parliament sits each day.
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Passport applications would not usually be linked together as such. It is not like applying for a travel visa, for example, when a family will travel together. This document confirms that someone is a citizen and lasts for 10 years. As I have said, the service standard of 10 weeks applies to paper-based applications and to the digital service, although adult renewals via the digital service will inevitably be quicker, and we would not delay issuing a passport if it was going through the paper process. Certainly, 90% between January and March were issued within six weeks, so not the 10-week standard, and over 1 million were issued last month. For a first passport it may take slightly longer—that is more likely to be a paper-based application—but the 10-week standard still applies.
In response to the Post Office fiasco, the Prime Minister said yesterday during an interview on TalkTV’s “The News Desk” that he does not care whether an institution such as the Post Office is public or private but it must deliver value and good service. That is why the likes of me have been speaking about the dangers of the privatisation of our NHS and the Tories’ ideological fascination with selling off everything in sight. Whenever there is a problem, why is it always someone else’s job on the line, rather than the Prime Minister’s and those of his Ministers?
Perhaps I will put my answer to that one in the post.