Passport problems

It summed up Boris Johnson’s premiership.

In May he told Parliament:

"To the best of my knowledge, everybody is getting their passport within four to six weeks."

Sad to say this was really far from the truth.  

Last week the House of Commons Home Affairs Select Committee heard a different story.

Over 500,000 passports were still waiting to be processed at the end of June, with delays likely to continue until the end of the year.

Passport Office chief Thomas Greig was grilled by the Commons Home Affairs Committee and said that about 55,000 passports are still taking ten weeks to process instead of the standard three weeks.

Of these around 10% of applicants had waited more than ten weeks, he admitted.

Greig said that in a normal year his department would process around seven million applications, but this is anticipated to rise to 9.5 million by the end of 2022.

Last year the number dropped below 4.5 million, committee members were told.

He could not guarantee a three-week target could be met by the end of the year.

Labour MP Diana Johnson, who chairs the committee, said she was "really shocked" by the delays.

The committee heard that a sharp rise in applications was expected as early as last July, as the UK came out of Covid restrictions.

www.gov.uk/government/organisations/hm-passport-office

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