HM Passport Office Backlog — House of Commons, 2022-06-14
Topic: Immigration
Holly Jamie Walker-Lynch (Labour, Centre-left): My hon. Friend makes an important point, speaking to the variety of reasons why people have to unlock this backlog, whether for work or personal reasons. There are economic reasons why we must get productivity up and have people able to travel again, alongside the family connections that we need to see re-established and people’s ability to undertake holidays once again As the Minister for migration is back in his place, I must say that I am grateful for the occasions when I have been able to reach out to him and he has intervened on cases where I have made an appeal directly to him. However, I am privileged in that I have his mobile number; what we are trying to get to is a position where—[Interruption.] For purely professional reasons, for anyone who made an odd noise there. We are trying to get to a process whereby a constituent out there would not need to have access to the Minister’s mobile number in order to have their case resolved by this Home Office At a time when the cost of living crisis is hitting the country hard and after two years of family holidays having to be postponed and rearranged, Home Office incompetence is landing British families with yet more unnecessary costs as they pick up the tab for the failures and pay for fast-track passport services, or face losing hundreds of pounds in cancelled holidays. The number of monthly fast-track applications has more than doubled since December 2021, as other colleagues have said. In April this year alone, British families spent at least £5.4 million on fast-track services The Passport Office’s own forecasts show that it expects to receive more than 240,000 fast-track applications between May and October this year, at a cost of an incredible £34 million. The cost of passport failure is being passed on to families stuck between a rock and a hard place, at the worst possible time. Even the fast-track service, as we have just heard, is not always a guarantee, with the website often saying that there is no availability of appointments due to high demand. My constituents report that they are calling day after day with no success. One constituent emailed: "Another stressful day has passed of getting no answers from the passport office. It’s nothing but incorrect information and false hope. I’ve arranged 3 call backs, one of them being from the upgrade team and not one of them have got back to me. I’m due to travel next Friday, and I have no hope whatsoever." The trade union PCS says that the Home Office originally estimated that 1,700 new staff members would be needed to deal with the backlog, but as far as we are aware—and we have had confirmation of this—only about 500 have actually been recruited. I would be grateful if the Minister confirmed the timeline for when those additional staff members will be joining their colleagues on the frontline In April, the Prime Minister reportedly said that he wanted to privatise the Passport Office, using more unparliamentary language than I have at the Dispatch Box. However, the Minister has confirmed to the House that most of the services within the process have already been privatised, with in-house staff dealing only with decisions on applications themselves. I suspect that it will come as a surprise to precisely no one to hear that the Prime Minister is not across the detail on this, but what does he think is left to privatise, and how exactly, based on the performance of the existing contractors, does he think it will improve the service? Looking at the three private service providers involved in passports, freedom of information requests published by the Mirror last month revealed that TNT, as the courier service for the Passport Office, has lost hundreds of passports and documents in the past two years despite applications being lower due to the pandemic, with 519 lost items in 2020 and a staggering 1,196 in the first seven months of 2021. This £77 million three-year contract was awarded in July 2019 and is due to be reconsidered this summer, so how do the Government propose to transform the courier service Sopra Steria, which provides frontline and support services including scanning, uploading and storage of documents, has its own backlogs, with PCS estimating that by April 500,000 applications completed by customers were awaiting opening and scanning on to Sopra Steria’s system. As we have heard, the performance of Teleperformance, which operates the helpline, has already been deemed unacceptable by Ministers. So how exactly does the Prime Minister think that to simply repeat the words "privatise it" is fixing a broken system that is already largely privatised Another constituent who got in touch shared their utter frustration: "We got married on the 7th May after postponing 3 times. I applied for an urgent upgrade a week ago as I travel a week today and I’ve still not had a phone call back to make the payment and begin fast track. I have less than a week to get my passport to go on my honeymoon. I applied with plenty of time and also applied for the urgent upgrade." Another said: "This issue has caused me and my family a great deal of distress, expense and now we are potentially looking at having to cancel our holiday, losing a significant amount of money." This Government are presiding over backlog Britain. If it is not passports, it is drivers’ licences, NHS waiting times, court dates, charging decisions, asylum decisions, housing waiting lists and Ukraine visas—and the list goes on. People cannot be expected to find the additional cash needed to bypass Home Office failure. They deserve better. This Government must apologise and find a way of delivering better.