THE GREAT PASSPORT BACKLASH
Fury over decision to make new UK passports in France as MPs and workers urge ministers to rethink decision
MINISTERS were last night urged to stand up for Britain following a furious backlash over the decision to make post-Brexit blue passports overseas.
The British company set to lose the £490million contract threatened to take the UK Government
to court unless it changes its mind.
MPs from across Parliament called on the Prime Minister and home Secretary to intervene after it was revealed that a Franco-Dutch firm will be handed the lucrative deal from October 2019.
As websites and phone-ins were deluged with protests over the news, Tory MP Andrew Rosindell demanded that Amber Rudd ‘put the interests of our country first’.
Matt hancock, the Culture Secretary, raised hopes of a reversal early yesterday when he said the procurement process was ‘not fully complete’.
But the home Office later defended its choice of foreign manufacturer Gemalto and said the decision would save about £120million over ten years,
which is equivalent to only £12million a year. Officials have given De La Rue, the historic British firm that currently makes UK passports, only ten days to appeal.
Chief executive Martin Sutherland said it would seek a judicial review on the tendering process if it is unsuccessful in reversing the move. He called for Theresa May to visit the firm’s Gateshead factory and explain to staff why the passport will be made in France.
The decision sparked an astonishing wave of reaction yesterday, with 4,500 comments on the BBC news site alone. It came as: ÷It was claimed the Home Secretary signed off the deal without knowing which firm had won the contract; ÷A YouGov poll suggested half of people would prefer the passports to be made in Britain, regardless of cost; ÷It emerged that Gemalto has been hit by a string of profit warnings and is being bought by a defence company quarter-owned by the French state.
EU competition rules state Governments should not favour domestic companies, which is why Britain opened up the tender to foreign firms. But exempwithout
‘No other country behaves like this’
tions can be made on ‘national security’ grounds, and Germany, Spain, Italy and France all award contracts for their travel documents to domestic makers.
De La Rue, the world’s largest passport maker, with a third of the market, claims it was not allowed to bid to print French passports.
Tory former Cabinet minister and Brexit supporter Priti Patel led the backlash against the Government’s decision, saying: ‘This is a big moment for Britain…the return of the iconic blue passport. Once again we need to look at how Government makes procurement decisions.
‘Ministers with responsibility for this should not have let it get this far … The national interest matters and the protection of citizens’ data matters…as well as making sure we bang the drum for Britain.’
Mr Rosindell urged Miss Rudd to find a way to ‘ensure those jobs stay in Britain’.
‘Why is it that we allow a French-Dutch company to be able to take the contract away from our own De La Rue, which is based in the North of England?’ he told Sky News.
‘The Government need to review how this has happened … there are times when you have to put the national interest before European procurement rules and this is one of those occasions.’
Labour MP John Spellar called the decision ‘scandalous’, adding: ‘One of the reasons the British people voted Brexit is because it was so fed up with civil servants and ministers giving work to foreign companies,’ he said.
‘Look at police cars. The French police drive French cars and vans, the German police drive German cars and vans. And yet in London you see the British police in Mercedes vans. No other country behaves like this.’ De La Rue boss Mr Sutherland said yesterday: ‘An icon of British identity is going to be manufactured in France.
‘I’m going to have to go and face those workers…explain to them why the British Government thinks it’s a sensible decision…We have printed the passport for nine years a hiccup … we have the best security systems in the world.’
Last year De La Rue, founded by London printer Thomas De La Rue in 1821, printed 17.3million passports for 40 countries. It also printed 7.1billion bank notes.
In its bid, the company pledged to ensure around 99 per cent of British passports were produced in the UK.
Currently, around 20 per cent of the seven million issued in Britain each year are made abroad.
Under the contract, virtually all British passports will be manufactured overseas, including in Gemalto’s plant in Poland.
But the Home Office said the task of uploading sensitive personal information to the passports would take place at two new plants in Fareham, Hampshire, and Heywood, Greater Manchester.
A spokesman said Gemalto was ‘experienced and trusted’ and a proportion of passports had been made overseas since 2009 ‘with no security or operational concerns’.
A Downing Street spokesman said: ‘We are still in the process of running a fair and open competition to ensure the new contract delivers a high-quality product which offers the best value for money for the taxpayer.’
In the YouGov poll some 49 per cent said the blue passports should be produced by a UK company even if an overseas firm offers better prices or services.
Some 29 per cent disagreed, while 22 per cent said they did not know.
THE decision to entrust the production of British passports post-Brexit to a Franco-Dutch concern is as perverse and imbecilic as any to have emerged from Whitehall in decades.
It is also a devastating blow to the workers at the De La Rue plant on Tyneside who stand to lose their jobs in a region that already has the highest unemployment rate in the country.
And – to judge by the deluge of phone calls and letters received by this newspaper – it is a decision the public regard with incredulity.
To be absolutely clear, the British bid had great merit. De La Rue – a company that has been operating since before the Battle of Waterloo – has never missed a single delivery in the decade of the existing contract, and also makes the new £5 and £10 notes, proof of its solid security credentials.
De La Rue argues, rightly, that cost should not be the only factor when producing vital security documents that cannot be forged – particularly in an age of terrorists and mass illegal migration.
So how significant and risible that French-Dutch giant Gemalto was successfully hacked by GCHQ in 2011 – but had no idea who by until four years later – and has posted four profits warnings in the past 18 months.
Value for money matters, of course. But over ten years, the seeming cost difference between the bids – some £120million – is peanuts, especially at a time when the aid budget is £13billion and growing so fast officials struggle to find enough corrupt regimes to squander it on.
So why, if ministers understood the symbolism of the return of the blue passport when they announced its return in December, did they miss this catastrophe in the making and not head it off?
How did they allow the decision to be made – as it appears – by an obscure committee of mandarins and not, like the French themselves, take advantage of an EU national security opt-out to ensure the British company was chosen, thereby safeguarding hundreds of jobs in the De La Rue factory in Gateshead?
Perhaps Chancellor Philip Hammond’s political tin ear – which saw him propose scrapping, in another misunderstanding of the public’s attachment to national symbols, the 1p and 2p coins – has become contagious.
Has it infected the Home Office – where we now learn the decision was rubber stamped – as well?
Perhaps this is the same deafness which has gripped the Business Department, which limply stands by while the Melrose predators threaten to break up the great British engineering firm GKN, which has vital strategic importance to our defences.
For 45 years, we have been in thrall to the EU, not just embracing its every rule and regulation, but gilt-edging them all.
Meanwhile, other EU countries wisely adopted the rules they liked and ignored the others altogether.
Yet now we are leaving the EU in line with the people’s decision in the Brexit referendum. And at this crucial juncture, symbols of our identity matter and the passport is one of them.
Fishing is another. Sold out by Ted Heath in 1973, Britain’s fishermen have seen their livelihoods slowly destroyed by the Common Fisheries Policy.
Anyone in government who thinks this totemic industry can be cynically traded away are playing with fire.
As for our passports, they are not tatty bits of commercial paper to be produced by a firm subsidised by a country that would not dream of allowing another nation to produce their passports.
If our rulers have an ounce of common sense, this decision will be reversed, and urgently.