Passport Applications

Michael Ellis Excerpts

Wednesday 18th June 2014 Commons Chamber

[Michael Ellis (Northampton North) (Con)]

I normally like to say that it is a pleasure to follow a Member who has just spoken, but I am afraid that I cannot do so on this occasion. The right hon. Member for Manchester, Gorton (Sir Gerald Kaufman) should be ashamed of himself. Having listened to his diatribe, I hope that he has tried to contact the Home Secretary, because if he has not he should explain that to the House.

I want to start by congratulating the Home Secretary. There will always be issues, crises and developments in Departments such as the Home Office, as we all know on both sides of the House, so it is not the avoiding of a problem that is the measure of a Home Secretary; it is how they deal with it when it arises. How has the Home Secretary dealt with this problem? She has done so in an exemplary fashion. Her Majesty’s Passport Office has been responding since the start of this year, not at the height of the season, during the summer months, because staff were brought in to respond to extra demand in January.

We must ask ourselves why there has been this substantial increase in demand, the biggest intake at this time of year for 12 years. Perhaps it is something to do with the improving economy under this Government. The economy is up because the long-term economic plan is working, so more business people need passports to travel and more people are going on holiday. How else could one account for the enormous increase in the millions of applications? To deal with that, 200 staff have been redeployed from office roles to front-line operations, the passport helpline now has 1,000 staff dealing with the situation, and the Passport Office is open from 7 am to midnight seven days a week. That has resulted in a considerable improvement in the number of straightforward passport applications being dealt with within the stipulated time frame.

However, between January and May more than 97% of straightforward passport renewals and child applications were processed within the three weeks advertised on the website—by the way, the website gives three weeks as a recommended time frame, not a guarantee—and 99% have been processed within four weeks. As it happens, I do not think that we can say that is good enough, because even 1% represents a large number of people who have been seriously inconvenienced.

We should not allow the message to be transmitted that somehow this service is completely collapsing, as the Labour Opposition are trying to do, to the detriment of Passport Office staff across the country who are working extremely hard, as we can see, for many hours of the day and night to get the job done. Let us give them credit and accept that a 97% success rate for any branch of government is extremely impressive. If we could arrest 97% of burglars or stop 97% of fires, we would be doing rather well. However, I accept that even 3% or 1% is too large and that we always have to do better. That is why the Home Secretary has put in place the resources that we have heard described in detail today.

We have again heard allegations that this situation is the result of job cuts, but the contrary is actually the case. On 31 March the Passport Office had 3,444 full-time equivalent staff, which is more than in 2013 and 2012. Comparisons are inaccurately drawn with 2010. As has already been explained, in 2010 this Government rightly scrapped Labour’s ID cards policy, so the Passport Office, as it is now constituted, is dealing with different things. Staff numbers have gone up.

We must also bear in mind the paramount importance of security. This country has a gold-standard passport service, and our passports are considered to be the gold standard by other countries, including those in the European Union. Other countries respect the fact that a British passport is a document they can trust, because they know and acknowledge that a vast array of security checks are done before a passport is issued. We must ensure that there is no circumvention of those checks, because they are of paramount importance. There will be complex cases, because we have a very cosmopolitan society and people want passports from around the world, and sometimes the checks take a while to complete, particularly because the other countries have their own time frames.

I acknowledge that there is a problem, but we have to bear in mind the points I have raised: resources are being put into this; the figures are improving; and the number of staff has increased. The so-called backlog is a misapprehension. We cannot count those figures that we would normally expect to see—150,000 a week—as a backlog. The figures for the past three weeks amount to a vast number, and they will continue to increase.