Passport delays threaten summer holidays

Delays at the Passport Office could threaten thousands of summer holidays as holidaymakers fail to receive their documents in time.

Some new applications are now taking as much as two months to process, reports the Telegraph, and there are fears the backlog could get even worse as the holiday season approaches.

It says the backlog has already reached half a million according to some estimates and staff from other departments have now been drafted in to help deal with the growing crisis.

Labour’s shadow immigration minister David Hanson said the party’s MPs had been "inundated" over the past six weeks with complaints from constituents struggling to get passports in time for holidays and trips despite applying at least three weeks in advance as recommended.

Mr Hanson, MP for Delyn in Flintshire, said 75 Labour MPs had reported more than 370 complaints in total.

According to the Labour Party, the complaints mainly concerned an office in Durham which processes passport applications for children and for people who have changed their names.

Unions claim poorly paid staff are being forced to "paper over the cracks" by working overtime and have warned they could be forced to take industrial action unless urgent steps are taken to address their concerns.

A spokesman for the Public and Commercial Services Union said staff are frustrated that they’re unable to provide the level of service that the public rightly expects from the passport office.

Mike Jones from the PCS, has written to Paul Pugh, the chief executive of the Passport Office, to demand urgent negotiations regarding pay and conditions for workers.

He says many of the current problems can be traced back to job cuts at the Passport Office and the use of private companies to undertake work that used to be done in-house.

But the Passport Office denied a backlog and said in a statement that it was experiencing an "exceptional early summer demand", which was put down to the improving economy and a rise in holiday bookings.

It said: "During this busy period we have processed more than 97 per cent of straightforward passport renewal and child applications within the three week target turnaround time.

"There is no backlog, with over 99 per cent of straightforward applications being processed within four weeks."

It said the guidance on turnaround times are three weeks for straightforward renewals and child passports and six weeks for new adult passports.