Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how much compensation has Her Majesty’s Passport Office paid out due delays in producing passports between 1 May 2022 and 1 September 2022.

The standard passport service does not have a guaranteed service time. Compensation would not usually be paid by virtue of an application taking longer to process than the published processing time, and customers are advised not to book without a passport that meets their travel needs.

For customers of the urgent Fast Track and Digital Premium services, £18,290.32 was paid in compensation where applications have fallen outside of their published service timeframe between 1 May 2022 and 1 September 2022. For the Fast-Track and Premium applications, this equates to 469 refunds processed.