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.

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.