Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many passport applications took longer than ten weeks to process in the final quarter of 2022.

A passport is not issued until all checks upon an application are satisfactorily completed. A proportion of applicants will therefore not receive their passport within a guided processing time* due to the need for further information from the customer, or due to work to prevent passport fraud.

Of the British passports issued in the final quarter of 2022, 26,160 were from standard UK applications that had taken longer than the current published processing time guidance of ten weeks. This represents approximately 2.5% of the total passports printed under this service during that period.

*The processing time includes 2-days for delivery of the passport to the customer.