55,000 passport applications delayed beyond 10-week deadline

Sign up to Simon Calder’s free travel email for expert advice and money-saving discounts Get Simon Calder’s Travel email Get Simon Calder’s Travel email SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy MPs reacted with incredulity when an HM Passport Office executive said that 55,000 applications are delayed beyond the 10-week stretch that prospective travellers are advised to allow. The committee chair, Labour’s Dame Diana Johnson, said MPs’ offices had been “inundated with people who are struggling to get their passports”. “The productivity of most MPs’ offices has gone down extraordinarily, more than anything else I have ever known in 25 years in parliament, because we are dealing with constituents who are desperate to get their passports that they applied for 10 weeks or more before.” In February 2018 the then-immigration minister, Caroline Nokes, told parliament: “We currently process 99.9 per cent of straightforward applications within three weeks, and on average, customers making a non-priority application can expect their passport to be issued seven working days after the application is made.” In April 2021, the normal three-week processing time for a renewal or new passport was extended to 10 weeks. “I hope, Mr Greig, you will take that message back.” Earlier, Simon Clark, chief secretary to the Treasury, told the BBC Today programme: “If you look now at the situation with, for example, passports, there is clear evidence that the Home Office is now totally on top of that situation, and that the long backlogs that were seen with that explosion of demand as people returned to travel are now abating.”