People all over Stirling are sweating over the delivery of new passports, forcing them to miss trips and vacations entirely due to delays.
Sterling MP Allyn Smith says he is inundated with messages from voters desperate to get their passports in time for daylight hours.
Smith has accused HM Passport Office of "an ongoing service catastrophe" in recent months.
He said a total of 72 voters across Stirling reported receiving slow, disorganized and poor service.
With the lifting of travel restrictions due to Covid-19, international travel has surged, with airports and travel agencies struggling to meet demand.
Passport Office performance is under increasing scrutiny as orders are lost, delays are frequent, and communication is delayed or confused.
One Stirling resident who felt frustrated about missing passports was Leanne Wilson. She says she has fallen ill due to continued delays in her family's passport renewal application.
Despite filing months earlier, Leanne felt her paperwork had fallen into a "black hole."
She said: I really feel sorry for the frontline staff who have to put up with extremely stressed applicants, no kidding.
"My husband and son's renewals were processed by completely separate offices at different ends of the UK, even though they both applied at the same time. My email was answered and the phone call was fruitless and required the intervention of Allyn Smith to proceed and resolve the matter. The cost was £300, double the standard fare due to timing.
"Something is completely broken at the passport office."
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Smith said:
"The system is completely inconsistent, with some applicants receiving their passports within six weeks, while others who sent their passports in the same envelope waited more than five months.
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“Our deepest sympathies to frontline staff struggling under tough demand, but management and UK ministers should have understood this coming. More budgets and more personnel are urgently needed to address the backlog and restore order to core government functions.”
The number of passports lost by the Ministry of Interior tripled last year amid chaos at passport offices.
Between January 1, 2021 and his October 31, authorities "confirmed missing" 312 of his passports, compared to 111 for the whole of 2020. did. There were 168 confirmed losses in 2019.
An additional 157 passports were recorded as lost or stolen during international shipments in 2021, compared to 85 in 2020 and 103 in 2019.
Figures for the last three months of the year are expected to be revealed next month.
Last month, vacationers were warned that the current 10-week passport wait was likely to continue into next year. Until April 2021, the expected turnaround time for his passport application was three weeks.
Thomas Greig, director of the HM Passport Office (HMPO), told parliamentarians that more than 500,000 passport applications were outstanding and that he was delayed by 10% due to requests for more information. He said he was.
In April, Boris Johnson threatened to privatize the Passport Office if performance did not improve. With numbers to show, the agency began a hiring drive this year to clear its backlog. This will reduce him to 3,704 in 2021. As of 30 June 2022, the institution employs 5,043 of his people.
A Home Office spokesman said:
``This is only a small fraction of the number of passports and related documents that have been successfully delivered. Every effort has been made to reduce the overall number of losses, and we will continue to work with our delivery partners to develop measures to reduce the overall number of losses.”
He added: . HMPO has significantly increased resources and will continue to recruit and ensure sufficient resources to cover attrition. ''
