Last year’s chaos at the Passport Office could be repeated again this year, as senior managers do not seem sufficiently concerned about the human impact of their failures, MPs have warned.
The public accounts committee (PAC) issued a highly critical report on Thursday into last year’s failings at HM Passport Office, which led to 360,000 people waiting for longer than 10 weeks for their passports to arrive.
The delays were caused by a surge in applications once Covid travel restrictions were eased. The committee said that officials appeared to be underprepared for the likelihood of a similar surge this year, which could lead to another year of people not being able to travel to family emergencies, missing out on jobs and having to cancel holidays.
Peter Grant, the Scottish National party member of the committee, said: “We were concerned when we spoke to bosses at the Home Office and Passport Office at the lack of curiosity as to the human impact of what happened last year.
“They did not know how many people had to cancel holidays or missed family emergencies, and they did not seem to be particularly concerned about not knowing. It made it seem that at the top of the organisations they never saw themselves as providing an important public service.”
He added: “From what we have heard in their responses, we haven’t seen enough to be sure that 2023 will be sorted out either.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “2022 was a record-breaking year, with HM Passport Office issuing 8.4m passports. We worked hard to meet this unprecedented demand and make improvements, hiring hundreds more staff to ensure customers could get their passports in time for travel.
“This action has also meant we have already issued a further record 2.7m passports so far this year, well within the required standard, with over 99.7% of standard applications being processed within 10 weeks and the majority of those delivered to customers well under this timescale, including 94.5% within three weeks.”
A report by the National Audit Office into last year’s problems found that officials had expected a surge in applications, but were still unable to cope as they flooded in. While 95% of passports were issued within 10 weeks, 360,000 were not. Of those, 134,000 had to be moved to a paper-based system because the normal digital system could not handle so much demand.
As delays mounted, distressed applicants were unable to contact anyone at the Passport Office, the PAC report found, with many calling multiple times and some being hung up on when they did get through.
Grant said that in many cases applications were redated when they were put into the paper system, meaning that officials thought applications had just been made when they had actually been in the system for weeks. Meanwhile, outside contractors brought in to help manage the workflow were finding it impossible to meet their agreed targets, the report said.
The Passport Office is predicting nearly 10m applications this year – 1.3m more than it received last year.
While the office is planning to meet that demand by relying on surge teams and moving people into different roles at short notice, MPs criticised it for not doing more to encourage people to make their applications earlier. They also warned that any delays will be exacerbated by a five-week strike by more than 1,000 staff until 5 May.
“They were hopelessly underprepared last time, even though they didn’t get as many applications as they expected,” said Grant.
“This year they are going to have more applications, and will have had staff on strike for five weeks in the buildup. We just hope they won’t blame all the problems which have been building up for a while solely on the industrial action.”
