The Home Secretary has accused a Manchester MP of ‘scaremongering’ after he mentioned passport delays in The Commons.
Priti Patel claims Afzal Khan ‘deliberately sought to mislead the public by misrepresenting the time it is taking to process passport applications’ in a letter, sent late last night.
“Your deliberate political actions will have unnecessarily worried hundreds of thousands of members of the British public who are currently making applications, in order for you to make a futile and cheap political attack against the government,” she writes.
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It comes after Mr Khan told the Commons that the Passport Office backlog is placing ‘additional pressure’ on families. He said some of his constituents have been waiting for up to 14 weeks for passports.
The government website currently advises that people may have to wait up to ten weeks to receive a passport.
During Prime Minister’s Questions on Wednesday, the Manchester Gorton MP said: “Two weeks ago the Prime Minister told the House: ‘To the best of my knowledge everybody is getting their passport within four to six weeks’, however the Passport Office is currently quoting a 10-week service time, with many of my constituents waiting well over that period.
“Cancelled summer trips could cost families over £1 billion. Does the Prime Minister accept that the Passport Office backlog is placing additional pressure on families already struggling with the cost-of-living crisis?”
Boris Johnson replied that ‘91% are getting their passport within six weeks’ and said the government is putting hundreds more staff into the Passport Office.
“The strength of demand by the way is a sign of the robustness of the economy because everyone is frankly wanting to go on holiday and quite right too,” he added.
Mr Khan began yesterday’s question by quipping: "I'd have more sympathy for the words 'get on with the job' if it actually started in the first place".
He later tweeted a video of that moment, and the Prime Minister’s reaction, commenting: “I think I may have broken @BorisJohnson”
Mr Khan now believes his joke ‘irritated’ the Home secretary enough to prompt her to write the letter.
He told The Mancunian Way newsletter: “When I made that joke, the Deputy Prime Minister shouted ‘no one is laughing’. As far as I could hear, half the chamber was laughing.”
In her letter to Mr Khan, the Home Secretary states that Passport Office staff are working ‘tirelessly’ to meet demand and have processed nearly 3 million passports in the last three months - less than 1.5 percent of which took ten weeks.
Ms Patel writes that over ‘90 percent’ of applications were processed ‘within six weeks’ in May and says 5 million UK passport holders with expired, or soon to be expired passports have been ‘engaged with’ and informed of ten-week delays since April 2021.
She added that the report by the Centre of Economics and Business Research - which Mr Khan referenced when mentioning a potential ‘£1billion’ cost to the economy - used figures that were ‘not grounded in reality’.
“I hope you will think again before misrepresenting the operational delivery of a government agency and the hard-working officials who have been working tirelessly to deliver passports to members of the British public and refrain from your deliberate and inappropriate scaremongering in future,” she added.
Mr Khan insists that some of his constituents have been waiting more than ten weeks for a passport.
“The Home Secretary is accusing me of scaremongering but I was only quoting the time for passports that her department is giving to people. If you Google it, it’s on their website,” he says.
“I have constituents who have been waiting 13, 14 weeks for their passport. Then she has the cheek to say that isn’t the case.
“The £1 billion I quoted is from an industry think tank report. In fact they actually quoted £1.1billion.
“The Home Secretary also accused me of upsetting the hard working people at the Home Office. She’s taken it very personally.”
Mr Khan says he did not think his question would be controversial when he spoke in the Commons on Wednesday.
“I thought the Prime Minister would simply say ‘this is an important matter and we’re doing all we can’. It was totally the opposite” he says.
