Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what proportion of applications to renew or modify a passport took more than six months in each of the last five years; and what the reasons were for the time taken in such cases.

Due to the way that data on passport applications is captured, it is not possible to show the proportion of applications taking over six months. However, the numbers and proportions of straightforward properly completed passport applications taking over 20 days are represented in the attached table. Passport applications occasionally take longer to process than the published expected processing time of three weeks. This can be for a variety of reasons, including that additional checks need to be made due to fraud concerns. Repatriation of international passport processing back to HMPO took place in 2013/14 therefore processing data for overseas applications is unavailable prior to that date and is not included in the attached tablefor years prior to 2013/14.