Hundreds Wait For Passports On Hottest Day As Ministers Accused Over Soaring Delays

Dozens of Home Offie staff have been diverted to man a helpline for MPs as enquiries about constituents’ passport delays soar, it has emerged.

- May Bulman

Ministers have been accused of “failing to plan ahead” after the government revealed that 25 members of non-frontline HM Passport Offie staff have been trained to work on the Home Offie’s MP enquiry line, with an average of 15 staff now on the phones each day.

Hundreds of people queued outside the Passport Offie on the hottest day of the year yesterday, in a bid to get their passports in time for the school holidays after already having faced hefty delays. The Passport Offie Twitter page is being inundated with tweets every few minutes by individuals enquiring about the lengthy delays they are facing and requesting urgent help.

More than 35,000 were left waiting longer than 10 weeks to receive a new passport between January and March of this year, according to Home Office figures released to shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper last month. The number of full-time Passport Offie staff has also dropped by 681 over the past five years, according to the data, falling from 3,913 to 3,232, with many of these civil servants replaced by agency staff.