Hundreds of thousands of people were let down by HM Passport Office (HMPO) over the last year, with “unacceptable” delays in receiving their passports, a report from the Public Accounts Committee has concluded.
The scathing document said that HMPO “lacks ambition” to perform better, raises doubts around digital transformation, and suggests there may be knock-on effects for years to come.
Although 95 per cent of customers between January and September 2022 received their travel documents within the advertised 10 weeks, around 360,000 people were forced to wait longer.
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) said “ultimately [HMPO]’s performance let down” applicants, and “the consequences of these delays included people being unable to travel for family emergencies, losing money spent on holidays and having difficulties proving their identities”.
HMPO has blamed the record number of passport applications received in 2022, when the last of the UK’s Covid-19 travel restrictions were lifted. However, total demand in 2022 was lower than it forecasted.
Among the failings uncovered was the Passport Office’s digital system being unable to handle demand, meaning 134,000 applications were moved to a less efficient paper-based system.
Those moved onto the legacy paper process should have been bumped up to the front of the queue for processing. Instead, they were treated as new cases, and the number of weeks it had taken to process the application was reset to zero; as a result, HMPO did not know how long these applicants had actually been waiting for their passports, and many were incorrectly informed that their applications had only recently been received.
Labour MP Nick Smith, joint lead on this inquiry, said that issues with passport applications “became the number one casework issue in my office, crowding out other important work as staff strove to help with multiple urgent cases every day.”
He added: “It is disappointing that HMPO’s decision-making failed to focus on the customers’ experience during this frustrating time, and I’m concerned that a failure to upgrade their clunky system may result in similar scenes this year.”
The investigation believes that problems were exacerbated by the poor performance of contractors. PAC said that IT consultancy Sopra Steria – responsible for opening and scanning paper…
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