Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what recent estimate she has made of the number of applicants affected by passport application processing delays in (a) Coventry North East constituency, (b) Coventry, (c) the West Midlands and (d) England; and what steps her Department is taking to clear the backlog in passport applications.

Since April 2021, people have been advised to allow up to ten weeks to get their passport. Across the first 6 months of 2022, Her Majesty’s Passport Office processed 97.7% of UK standard applications within 10 weeks.

HM Passport Office staffing numbers have been increased by over 1200 since April 2021. This has delivered the operational capacity needed to process applications in record numbers, with approximately one million being dealt with each month.