Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what (a) number and (b) proportion of applications for a passport for a child overseas take longer than (a) three, (b) four and (c) six months to be processed.

A total of 49,173 international child passport applications finished processing in January-June 2015. Of this total, 3,242 (6.6%) took longer than three months to be processed, 2,539 (5.2%) took longer than four months to be processed, and 1,657 (3.4%) took longer than six months to be processed.

The processing time is the length of time from receipt of the application to the passport being printed. For international child passport applications processed in the same period, the average processing time was 19.4 working days. Information is not held on the time between receipt of application and interview date as the date of interview can be subject to customer availability.

Her Majesty’s Passport Office must be fully satisfied that all appropriate checks have been completed successfully prior to the issuance of passport facilities. This is particularly important in relation to child applications as part of Her Majesty’s Passport Office responsibility to protect potentially vulnerable children, including those potentially at risk of child trafficking and to maintain the integrity of the British Passport.

These checks can require the provision of information from other agencies overseas – particularly in complex applications such as surrogacy cases.

Delays in the provision of this information to HMPO can lead to significantly extended timeframe in processing applications.