Holidaymakers forced to use fast-track service to beat backlog

2022-12-10

Passport chiefs rake in £46 million from failure after holidaymakers were forced to use fast-track service to beat backlog which plagued Britons’ holiday plans in the summer

Passport backlog in the summer brought in £46 million for the service
People were forced to opt for fast-track services to make sure passports arrived
Backlog caused the £75.50 ‘standard’ renewal to slip from three to ten weeks

The passport backlog which plagued Britons’ holiday plans in the summer brought in £46 million for the service, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Between March and July, more than 300,000 people were forced to opt for pricey fast-track services to make sure passports arrived in time for trips abroad. Figures show that in this time the Passport Office took in £30 million more than in the same time period in 2019.

On Friday, a damning report by the Government’s spending watchdog blamed working from home practices for aggravating the backlog, which reached more than 500,000 cases at its peak in June and prompted former Prime Minister Boris Johnson to threaten to ‘privatise the a***’ off the service if it failed to tackle the fiasco.

The passport backlog which plagued Britons’ holiday plans in the summer brought in £46 million for the service, The Mail on Sunday can reveal

The office claimed to have prepared for a surge in applications after Covid restrictions ended, but the estimated 5 million submitted this summer caused the processing time for the £75.50 ‘standard’ renewal to slip from three to ten weeks – a timescale still in place today.

Would-be travellers decided not to gamble with the cheaper service, instead opting for the £142 one-week fast-track and £177 two-day online premium services. Both services require an in-person appointment.

It led to lengthy queues at passport offices across the UK, with some people having to travel to access fast-track services outside their region.

Angela Tindle, from Kettering, Northamptonshire, was forced to travel to Glasgow for an appointment after she applied for her son’s passport in March but still had not received it three months later. She said her calls and emails went unanswered, causing ‘stress and tears’.

She said: ‘My husband and I drove 377 miles to Glasgow, stayed in a cheap hotel and got up at 5am to join the queue at the passport office’.

In July, Passport Office boss Thomas Greig was called to Westminster to explain the backlog but denied staff working from home had any impact. This has now been contradicted by the National Audit Office, whose investigation has concluded that working from home pushed back the introduction of a new digital system to process applications, due to have been finished by March this year – before the crisis blew up.

Figures obtained by the MoS under a Freedom of Information request have shown that in March the organisation took in £9.3 million from express services, compared to £3.3 million for the same month in 2019.

In May, the income from express services soared to £11 million – in contrast to £2.9 million in May 2019.

Joe Ventre, digital campaign manager of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, said: ‘Taxpayers will be appalled that the Passport Office has seemingly benefited from its own failures.’

A Home Office spokesman said: ‘A customer would only need to pay for a priority service where they need a passport sooner than ten weeks. An expedited service is available free of charge for the small percentage who did not receive their passport within the published processing time.’

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