Half a million people face ruined summer holidays as passport backlog causes chaos
Monday, June 9, 2014 @ 9:03 AM
Families face the threat of not being able to go on holiday as an overwhelmed Passport Office struggles to issue travel documents in time.
Up to 500,000 may not get their documents before their planned departure date as the under-staffed department struggles to deal with the annual surge in applications.
Labour and Tory MPs have warned that the service is in turmoil and say they have had hundreds of complaints from constituents about delays.
Making changes to passports or issuing new documents should be done within three to four weeks, but travellers are complaining it is taking twice as long.
Some have been advised to pay up to £55.50 extra each to get passports fast-tracked, which should guarantee they arrive on time.
In a bid to manage the crisis, a quarter of staff employed to detect fraudulent paperwork have been transferred to help process the thousands of delayed applications.
But Labour’s immigration spokesman David Hanson has warned that reducing the size of fraud teams is a ‘real worry to the integrity and security of the passport system’.
Mr Hanson said Labour MPs had been inundated with more than 400 complaints in the past six weeks from constituents struggling to get passports in time for holidays and trips abroad.
The Passport Office, part of the Home Office, has received around 300,000 more applications since January than in the same period last year and has blamed the surge on ‘the improving economy and a rise in holiday bookings’.
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