Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many staff in her Department have been (a) redeployed and (b) hired since March 2022 to alleviate delays in processing passport applications; and if she will make a statement.

Since April 2021, Her Majesty’s Passport Office have added over 850 additional staff to help meet the current unprecedented demand for passports, with almost 400 of these staff brought in since March 2022. A further 350 staff will added during the summer.

HM Passport Office’s makes use of its own flexible resources, with fully trained staff being deployed to operational roles as required. It also routinely uses flexible resource from HMRC to support with peaks in passport demand, with over 80 full-time equivalents from HMRC supporting passport services in May.

This has helped to process applications in record numbers. Across March, April, and May, HM Passport Office completed the processing of approximately three million applications, with 98.5% of applications from the UK being completed within the published processing time of up to ten weeks.