Asked by: Jim Shannon (Democratic Unionist Party - Strangford)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment his Department has made of the potential merits of having a passport assessor in Hargeisa.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
All applications for British passports are conducted by His Majesty’s Passport Office in the UK. This has removed the fraud risk of transporting blank books to, and safekeeping them in, overseas posts, as well as aligning security checks and fraud assessment processes to those conducted on applications made in the UK.
Through economies of scale and use of new technology, HM Passport Office substantially reduced processing costs. This has been passed on to the customer, with an adult overseas passport costing £33 less than when the transition from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office completed in March 2014.
Asked by: Wera Hobhouse (Liberal Democrat - Bath)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many passports were lost by the Passport Office in each year since 2018.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
The data held for secure delivery services does not break down losses by passports only.
The table below shows the passports and supporting documents confirmed as lost in the possession of providers of secure delivery services as a percentage of applications received in each year from 2018:
| UK | Overseas |
Year | % of passports and supporting documents lost | % of passports and supporting documents lost* |
2018 | 0.006% | 0.020% |
2019 | 0.002% | 0.017% |
2020 | 0.002% | 0.013% |
2021 | 0.009% | 0.036% |
2022 | 0.006% ** | 0.030% *** |
* The data held does not distinguish between items confirmed as ‘lost’, and those that declared as ‘stolen’.
** Data currently held from 1 January to 30 September.
*** Data currently held from 1 January to 31 October.
Asked by: Peter Grant (Scottish National Party - Glenrothes)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, pursuant to the Answer of 9 June 2022 to Question 13114 on Asylum and Passports: Applications, how many and what proportion of asylum decision makers hired since the start of 2022 have completed the (a) foundation training and (b) mentoring period as part of the asylum transformation programme.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
The Asylum Transformation programme aims to bring the asylum system back into balance and modernise it. It is focused on increasing productivity by streamlining, simplifying and digitising the system to speed up processes and increase efficiency and output.
Asked by: Drew Hendry (Scottish National Party - Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch and Strathspey)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment her Department has made of the potential merits of changing the wording of requests for previous passports during passport applications process to indicate clearly that the request is for all passports including those not from the UK.
Answered by Robert Jenrick
Passport application guidance outlines the requirement for customers to send in all their latest passports. In the case of a dual national, this includes a passport issued by another country.
While His Majesty’s Passport Office considers this guidance to be clear, it will continue to keep this under review to ensure that it is meeting the needs of its customers.
Asked by: Lord Truscott (Non-affiliated - Life peer)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask His Majesty's Government what plans they have to stop TLScontact retaining applicants' passports for up to eight months whilst UK Family Visa applications are being processed.
Answered by Lord Murray of Blidworth
TLS Contact and VFS Global operate the network of overseas Visa Application Centres (VACs) on behalf of UKVI. Whilst the collection of biometric data is outsourced to commercial partners, they have no involvement in visa decision-making, which are made by British Government officials, and are unable to influence a visa decision outcome in any way.
Customers attending a VAC overseas will have their passport retained by the commercial partner whilst a decision is made on their application by the Home Office. Once a decision has been made, the commercial partner will contact the customer to invite them to attend the VAC to collect their passport and decision. Customers have the option of purchasing the ‘Keep my Passport’ service, which allows them to retain their passport whilst a decision on their application is being made.
TLS only oversee biometric appointments and document decision and do not have any involvement in visa decision making. (1) Family members of British Nationals in Russia, who need to make an urgent visa application, can contact TLS via the link on their website for support. There is sufficient appointment availability in (2) other countries to allow customers to attend an appointment elsewhere.
Asked by: Seema Malhotra (Labour (Co-op) - Feltham and Heston)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether she can provide a breakdown of (a) the number of engagements made with Members Staff, and (b) the number of cases investigated, in the Home Office walk-in surgery in the Portcullis House Customer Hub in 2022.
Answered by Tom Pursglove - Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)
The Home Office is unable to provide the information requested.
The Home Office Portcullis House team dealt with over 30,000 enquiries and at its peak handled more than 1,000 enquiries per day.
The department wrote to all Members on 18 August 2022 to advise that a national programme of engagement events enabling MPs and their caseworkers to meet with Home Office officials nearer to their constituencies would replace the Portcullis House walk in service.
Urgent enquiries, including passport and Ukraine visa applications should be sent to the urgent inbox: mpurgentqueries@homeoffice.gov.uk.
Asked by: Seema Malhotra (Labour (Co-op) - Feltham and Heston)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether her Department has assessed the potential merits of reinstating the Home Office walk-in surgery in the Portcullis House Customer Hub.
Answered by Tom Pursglove - Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)
The Home Office is unable to provide the information requested.
The Home Office Portcullis House team dealt with over 30,000 enquiries and at its peak handled more than 1,000 enquiries per day.
The department wrote to all Members on 18 August 2022 to advise that a national programme of engagement events enabling MPs and their caseworkers to meet with Home Office officials nearer to their constituencies would replace the Portcullis House walk in service.
Urgent enquiries, including passport and Ukraine visa applications should be sent to the urgent inbox: mpurgentqueries@homeoffice.gov.uk.
Asked by: Seema Malhotra (Labour (Co-op) - Feltham and Heston)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, if she sill publish a breakdown of the cost to her Department of staffing and operating the walk-in surgery in the Portcullis House Customer Hub for Ukraine and passport cases in 2022.
Answered by Tom Pursglove - Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)
The Home Office is unable to provide the information requested.
The Home Office Portcullis House team dealt with over 30,000 enquiries and at its peak handled more than 1,000 enquiries per day.
The department wrote to all Members on 18 August 2022 to advise that a national programme of engagement events enabling MPs and their caseworkers to meet with Home Office officials nearer to their constituencies would replace the Portcullis House walk in service.
Urgent enquiries, including passport and Ukraine visa applications should be sent to the urgent inbox: mpurgentqueries@homeoffice.gov.uk.
Asked by: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what targets her Department has in place for reducing the backlog of applications for (a) Leave and Indefinite Leave to Remain, (b) citizenship and (c) passports.
Answered by Tom Pursglove - Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)
(a) We have faced extremely high pressures in the past two 2 years in relation to visa application routes, including leave to remain and indefinite leave to remain. All routes have seen extremely high demand following the end of the pandemic and the easing of travel restrictions. We also prioritised capacity earlier this year to help people forced to flee their homes as a result of President Putin’s invasion of Ukraine get to safety. We have worked hard to reduce processing times and we are now back within service standard across a number of our routes, but we continue to further improve the speed of our decision making by rolling out better, more efficient technology, including digital interviewing and moving away from a paper based system and also recruiting more decision making staff.
(b) Our website provides up-to-date information on our visa processing times across the routes we offer, and we encourage customers to continue to refer to these updates as our performance changes on a regular basis. At the same time, we continue to prioritise any urgent, compelling, or compassionate case. The most recent published data on citizenship applications (August 2022) shows that of those straightforward applications received, the percentage completed within the Service Standard of six months was 98.4%. The latest information on processing times can be found in the UK Visas and Immigration Transparency Data, available on Gov.uk.
(c) Between January and August, 95.3% of standard UK applications were processed within the published guidance of ten weeks, and the volume of applications outside of this processing time continues to fall.
Passport demand is highly seasonal. As is always the case in the autumn and winter, His Majesty’s Passport Office is working to reduce its overall work in progress ahead of demand increasing again from January.
Asked by: Chi Onwurah (Labour - Newcastle upon Tyne Central)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, on 1 October 2022, (a) how many asylum claims were awaiting decision (b) how many Indefinite Leave to Remain applications were outstanding and not decided and (c) how many passport applications had waited longer than 12 weeks to be processed fully.
Answered by Tom Pursglove - Minister of State (Minister for Legal Migration and Delivery)
a) The Home Office publishes data on asylum in the ‘Immigration Statistics Quarterly Release’. Data on asylum applications awaiting a decision can be found in table Asy_D03 of the ‘asylum and resettlement detailed datasets’. Information on how to use the datasets can be found in the ‘Notes’ page of the workbooks.
Please note the data show a snapshot as at the last day of each quarter, rather than the number of asylum applications awaiting a decision over the entire quarter. The latest data relates to as at 30 June 2022. Data as at 30 September 2022 will be published on 24 November 2022.
Information on future Home Office statistical release dates can be found in the ‘Research and statistics calendar’.
b) As we do not hold data in the format requested, the Home Office cannot provide that answer without disproportionate cost, as the requested information could not be provided without a manual search of all the applications per year.
c) Of the passport applications that completed processing in the week ending 2 October, 5,631 had been with His Majesty’s Passport Office for more than 12 weeks. This includes international applications with a published indicative processing time of more than 12 weeks. Figures come from a live database which is constantly changing and therefore these numbers are subject to change.