Jayne Dowle: Passport to frustration as system hit by shambles

A friend’s passport renewal is one of the estimated 30,000 caught up in the backlog. She’s not happy. She’s due to go to Spain with her husband in less than a week and is still waiting for that brown envelope to drop through the letterbox. The holiday has been paid for. The time is booked off work. The new clothes have been bought. What to do? Take a day off and travel to Liverpool and attempt to secure her passport in person? Wait and see what happens and risk losing all the money she has paid for her trip? Or transfer the holiday into the name of her daughter and her friend and make alternative arrangements for a later date?

It’s not a life or death situation. It’s not even her honeymoon. However, it’s damned inconvenient and how to solve it is taking up most of her waking hours. It’s some comfort to her that extra staff are being deployed to try and tackle the backlog. Still, she doesn’t hold out much hope that the emergency administrators brought in to work round the clock will be able to rescue her application from the pile. Her husband told her to stop panicking. It could arrive anyway.

If you look at it in context, the Passport Office processes 5.7 million new or renewed passports each year. At any one time, it is handling just under half a million applications. David Cameron says that just 30,000 are taking longer than the target time of three weeks to turn round right now.

Now step back from that a minute and just think. The Prime Minister has been forced to stand up and make a statement about something which should run like clockwork.

Questions have been asked in the House of Commons. Home Secretary Theresa May is under attack from her Labour opposite number, Yvette Cooper, who says that “it’s a sorry shambles from a sorry department”. And Ed Miliband, seizing the opportunity to make political capital, is fuelling the flames of panic at Prime Minister’s Questions. He conveniently forgets that the Labour government presided over a similar situation in the 1990s when computer problems caused queues around the block.

The Labour leader’s intervention might be less than helpful, but it tells us a lot about how such a crisis unfolds and gathers speed. There’s been a surge in applications since the economy picked up and a rise in the number of applications from overseas since offices abroad were closed down to cut costs. Didn’t a lightbulb go on somewhere in Whitehall?

It’s all very well Ministers being called to account, but surely the problems should have been anticipated months ago by the civil servants who are paid handsomely to run the Passport Office. The unions blame job cuts and reorganisation of the system, timed perfectly to hit just as the peak holiday season gets underway. Whose idea was that then? Surely it’s not too much to ask to expect those in charge of running government departments to plan ahead and do their jobs efficiently? Perhaps it is.

It also tells us a lot about people. For many individuals going about their daily lives, applying for a passport is one of the few times that they will come up against the great lumbering machine which is otherwise known as state bureaucracy. If you don’t claim benefits and pay your tax through PAYE, you will be pretty much spared the stress and trauma of dealing with a so-called “helpline” or an “interactive” website which is anything but.

It might come as a shock then to find that incompetence comes as pretty much standard when it comes to government departments. You need to be patient, ruthless and prepared for a fight – and a lot of phone calls. There’s an argument that people should be more organised and not leave it until the last minute to renew. I can’t really take the moral high ground on that one. I’m the person who forgot entirely about the MoT for the car last year until it was a full three months overdue. In our busy lives, it’s easy to overlook things. And what about those who have to travel for work or personal reasons without much notice?

It’s easy to take efficiency for granted, until the system fails and reminds us that it isn’t efficient at all. In our modern world, where we can book flights to the other side of the globe with a credit card and mobile phone, we might expect a passport to appear just as miraculously.

When all the shouting is over, and all the blame has blown out, this crisis will remind us that instant gratification isn’t always forthcoming. I thought about saying that to my friend who is fretting over her trip to Spain. Then I realised that this would be even less helpful to the situation than Ed Miliband ranting at PMQs.