Need a passport in a hurry? You’ll have to wait two weeks
THE UK’s passport agency is ‘in chaos’, with holiday- makers being forced to wait two weeks for an appointment to renew documentation.
The Identity and Passport Service is telling applicants there are no appointments available and they must ‘ring back tomorrow’, in the hope of cancellations.
There are no ‘ emergency’ appointments – where a new passport is issued on the same day – for another fortnight, and only in the North East of England.
Unions said the agency, which processes tens of thousands of passports every day in the summer, was in chaos because of job cuts and was unable to handle the level of demand.
One worried applicant from Hampshire told the Daily Mail he was offered an appointment in two weeks in Durham, hundreds of miles from his home.
Paul Jessop, 52, from Petersfield, was told the earliest he could get an appointment would be August 4.
And Mr Jessop, the chief executive of the UK Plastering Federation, would have to travel hundreds of miles to an office in Durham for the ‘oneday emergency service’ because there were no appointments available in London. Otherwise he would be forced to wait a week after the appointment for his passport to be issued.
He said: ‘I rang them this afternoon and after about ten minutes of waiting they said the first appointment they could offer was on August 4. It’s insane.
‘They could do nothing in less than three weeks despite saying there’s one- day appointments. The one-day emergency appointment is nothing of the sort. I was lost for words.’
Mr Jessop wanted a passport for his daughter Rose, who is six, so he could drive her and her four older brothers to visit his sister in Valencia, Spain, at the start of next month. He has now cancelled his plans.
An inquiry to the agency’s hotline last night, asking for an appointment for a lost-passport application, revealed none was available anywhere in England and Wales for a fortnight, apart from in Durham.
Anyone wanting to go to London, Newport, Peterborough or Liverpool would have to call again in the morning when fresh appointments would become available, a call handler said.
Appointments were available earlier but only if you were prepared to travel to Belfast or Glasgow.
A spokesman for the Public and Commercial Services
‘Bungling ministers’
Union said: ‘ The chaos we’ve all seen at the borders recently is mirrored in the passport agency, where bungling ministers have cut so many jobs they can’t cope with the demand.
‘It’s sheer incompetence, and we’ve been warning for months that this would happen. It’s not difficult to work out that during the summer lots of people will want a passport.’
At the beginning of this month, ministers cut the price of the standard passport by £5.
Immigration minister Damian Green boasted the price cut was possible because the Identity and Passport Service had made efficiency savings of £40million, but was maintaining a ‘very high service’.
The price cut to £72.50 will not take effect until September, after the rush of summer applications.
Mr Green said at the time: ‘Not only has IPS made the efficiency savings to make this possible, but it has done so whilst continuing to provide a very high standard of service to customers.’
IPS has closed a string of interview offices and a passport processing centre in the past year and cut staff numbers by 9 per cent – about 315 staff.
A spokesman for IPS said: ‘The peak period for passport applications is under way, and we are reminding customers to leave at least three weeks for a renewed passport to arrive and six weeks if applying for the first time.
‘We are successfully issuing 99 per cent of renewed passport within three weeks. We are also successfully issuing 97 per cent of first-time passports within six weeks.
‘We may not always be able to offer an appointment on the same or next day.
‘However, cancellations do occur and people can contact our customer service team to see if any are available at short notice.’