Every time Reanne House’s wedding planner calls, her stomach does a flip. With just weeks to go before her £30,000 nuptials in Greece, the 27-year-old freelance artist had hoped she’d be feeling excited by now — especially after two years of planning and postponing the ceremony due to Covid. But this time it’s not the pandemic House is worried will mean she has to cancel her wedding, but HM Passport Office. Her fiancé Patrick Corbin, 29, applied for his new passport seven weeks ago — 13 weeks before the ceremony — and still hasn’t had the application approved.
Call handlers have told Corbin to be patient, but with stories about some Brits waiting as long as five months for a new passport — amid what ministers are calling an “unprecedented surge” in applications as travel restrictions ease — the couple cannot relax. They’ve tried upgrading Corbin’s application to a £142 one-week fast-track one but Passport Office staff say that’s not possible, because his standard application is already under way. The staff’s only suggestion? Wait until two weeks before they’re due to fly, then the application will upgrade to the fast-track service automatically. House isn’t confident: the fast-track website crashed multiple times last week due to high demand.
“It makes me feel sick — I’ve not slept properly in weeks,” she says. If Corbin’s passport doesn’t come through in time and they have to cancel, they’ll lose £30,000 — the equivalent of a house deposit. “It would literally cripple us. Who will pay the compensation for our wedding if we can’t go?”
Their “nightmare” situation is one of a growing number of horror stories caused by the Government’s passport fiasco over recent weeks — including missed funerals, weddings, honeymoons, last goodbyes and important business meetings. Latest reports show there are still 700,000 outstanding passport applications to clear, leaving tens of thousands of families with the prospect of missing their holidays if it is not resolved by the summer holidays. Most travel insurers do not pay out for trips cancelled due to passport delays. The problems are being blamed on an internal recruitment crisis; poorly-trained, demoralised agency staff; and a post-Covid working-from-home culture. Last week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson vowed to “privatise the a***” out of the Passport Office if the 10-week wait for new documents is not reduced soon.
“I’ve lost 3kg in weight since last week and this week I have not been sleeping, I’m not eating,” said Londoner Dawn, 56, whose passport didn’t arrive in time for her to visit her sick father in Jamaica last week. “I’m not earning and it’s costing me to be in England. It’s a mess,” says law enforcement support worker Noel Cherowbrier, 57, who’s been waiting for his passport for 15 weeks so he can travel to Virginia for work.
What’s going on? More than five million Brits delayed renewing their passports because of Covid travel restrictions, leading to a backlog of hundreds of thousands. Pre-pandemic, the average waiting time for a new passport was three weeks, but this has skyrocketed to 10 weeks or more as holidaymakers book trips — and due to a new post-Brexit rule that travellers’ passports must be valid for at least three months after the date you intend to leave the EU country you are visiting, as well as being issued within the last 10 years.
“The times are so erratic and unreliable,” says Caroline Newport, who has been waiting three months for her passport, missing a family holiday to Spain. “I applied for a renewal of my daughter’s passport at the same time as my own. Her new passport arrived within three weeks. A friend applied mid-March and had received hers within three weeks. Yesterday I overheard a tearful woman on the bus pursuing her daughter’s passport, which she’s been waiting for for five months. She said it was urgent: she needs to go and visit her dying mother with her child.”
Processing times are not the only issue causing this shambles. Even when passports are eventually issued, many are experiencing huge delays to their new documents being delivered. Some applicants have reported waits of three months as delivery service TNT struggles to meet demand. The US-owned company, part of the FedEx group, signed a three-year, £77 million contract with the Home Office to deliver official travel documents in 2019 but has since been increasingly criticised for poor communication, missed deliveries and unacceptable delays.
A spokesperson for TNT has apologised for the delays, blaming a surge in deliveries. Others have no idea about the status of their application — the phone lines are blocked and the website keeps crashing. “I rang 240 times yesterday,” says technician Dominic Ram, 31, who’s been waiting for two months for a passport for his best friend’s stag do on May 13 — and still has no update. “It says there’s a 10-minute waiting time on the phone but I keep getting cut off after six minutes.”
Others have complained that they don’t have the luxury of calling at all, because they’re in jobs such as teaching and healthcare and hence unable to call during the working day.
What’s actually going on behind the scenes? Last week, ministers apologised for the delays, saying Downing Street chief of staff Steve Barclay had met with Passport Office officials and that they plan to recruit an additional 1,700 new staff. Meanwhile Teleperformance, the French-owned multinational on a five-year £22.8 million contract to provide the Passport Office’s call-handling services, has also been “urgently tasked to add additional staff” by the Home Office amid criticisms of hours-long hold times and poor service. “One of them told me they all work from home, that’s the reason why customer services have no access to the files [and] can’t give proper updates,” says British-Iranian national Mohammad Reza, 54, who queued outside the Passport Office in London last week after spending four hours on hold on the phone to them. “It’s shocking. Why are they still at home?”
Home Office minister Kevin Foster has admitted that the firm’s performance has been “unacceptable”, but Teleperformance isn’t the only French firm hired by the Home Office that’s come under criticism. Sopra Steria, a Paris-based company recruited to scan and upload documents into the Passport Office’s computer system, is reportedly responsible for the delay of as many as 300,000 applications, with officials admitting that the process is taking four times longer than normal.
The Passport Office has reportedly recruited an additional 500 members of staff already, with a further 700 coming by the end of May, and Foster says the department is “making a range of efforts — staff are working weekends, incentivised overtime.” But unions say the Government is facing a recruitment crisis and is struggling to hire enough permanent workers into the hundreds of positions it is hoping to fill. “This has left decisions on passport renewals being completed by agency staff with little training and insufficient oversight,” a spokesperson for the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) said last week. According to the PCS, this over-reliance on poorly-trained agency staff is creating a “collapse in morale and confidence in management” among Passport Office ranks.
Home Office minister Foster insists staff are working harder than ever, issuing more than a million passports last year — a 13 per cent rise on the previous record. The PM is reportedly unconvinced, summoning passport bosses to Number 10 last week to explain the chaos, and shadow home secretary Yvette Cooper warned the Home Office was “in danger of becoming a stay-at-Home-Office”.
But none of this is of any reassurance to House and Corbin as their wedding approaches. They’re still struggling to sleep and make plans — and even if the passport does come through in time, the delays will have ruined what should have been of the most exciting times of their lives.
