Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many and what proportion of passport applications were not processed within 10 weeks in each calendar month of 2022.
Since April 2021, His Majesty’s Passport Office has advised people to allow up to 10 weeks when applying for their passport using the standard service in the UK.
Of the standard UK applications resulting in a printed passport in the week ending 15 January 2023, 99.2% had been processed within ten weeks. HM Passport Office processed over one million more applications in 2022 than in any previous year.
Published processing times for overseas applications vary, starting from 11 weeks.
The total volume of printed passports for each calendar month in 2022 where the application was not processed within ten weeks, is shown in the table below:
Month | Total Printed | Total printed within 10 weeks | Volume over 10 weeks* | % Over 10 weeks |
Jan-22 | 387,869 | 378,639 | 9,230 | 2.4% |
Feb-22 | 639,388 | 632,044 | 7,344 | 1.1% |
Mar-22 | 858,037 | 851,133 | 6,904 | 0.8% |
Apr-22 | 904,634 | 890,190 | 14,444 | 1.6% |
May-22 | 975,367 | 944,307 | 31,060 | 3.2% |
Jun-22 | 862,946 | 798,531 | 64,415 | 7.5% |
Jul-22 | 696,054 | 603,996 | 92,058 | 13.2% |
Aug-22 | 572,517 | 485,465 | 87,052 | 15.2% |
Sep-22 | 498,579 | 453,971 | 44,608 | 8.9% |
Oct-22 | 443,409 | 418,415 | 24,994 | 5.6% |
Nov-22 | 472,237 | 454,496 | 17,741 | 3.8% |
Dec-22 | 272,520 | 263,307 | 9,213 | 3.3% |
Total | 7,583,557 | 7,174,494 | 409,063 | 5.39% |
* Data for priority services is recorded as performance against the respective service level only (1 day for Premium, 7 days for Fast Track), with the end-to-end processing time not being held in a reportable format. Passports printed under a priority service are therefore excluded.