How the failing Passport Office was transformed into Britain’s most efficient public service

Newport HM Passport Office

Two years ago, Eleanor Freeman was spending several hours every day on the phone to the Passport Office. The mother-of-two was desperately chasing up the application for her nine-month-old daughter as the days ticked down to the family’s first ever holiday abroad.

Having been told the “fast-track” process would take three to five weeks, she had now waited two months. Eventually, the family obtained the baby’s passport after her partner took a train 60 miles from Nottingham to a passport office in Peterborough.

“It was very stressful, just mentally exhausting,” says Freeman, 29, recalling how the family faced losing £1,400 for rescheduling their holiday to Spain. “I was on the phone, on hold, for days. We even went to the local MP.

“They still haven’t refunded my money for the fast-track passport that they never provided, so I actually paid twice for the passport.”

Eleanor Freeman's daughter, then nine months, finally holding the passport that enabled her to go on her first trip abroad with her family

She was among more than 360,000 people hit by huge delays issuing passports between January and September 2022, causing disruption not just to holidays, but to trips to see dying loved ones and people’s ability to prove their identities for work. In total, during this period, the Passport Office received 11,400 letters from MPs demanding action for stranded constituents and was forced to admit it had serious “lessons” to learn following a damning report by the National Audit Office.

Two years on, British holidaymakers are finding new passports on their door mats within days of lodging applications, following a remarkable turnaround that puts HM Passport Office’s (HMPO) speed and efficiency in dramatic contrast with other ailing public services.

Current applicants are told to expect a passport within three weeks but many report much shorter turnarounds, describing their experience to The Telegraph as “excellent”, “magic” and “almost too efficient”.

Insiders say both the 2022 crisis and subsequent improvement were a consequence of the Covid pandemic, which saw a historic lull in applications followed by a “tsunami of demand”.

Amid lockdowns and international travel restrictions throughout 2020 and 2021, an estimated 5 million people had delayed applying for passports they could not use, and with normal business quiet, HMPO turned its mind to accelerating a long-awaited “digital transformation”.

“The Digital Application Processing (DAP) system had been in the pipeline for a long time, with the aim of getting the system off the old paper forms,” says an HMPO official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

“Waiting for it became a bit of a joke in the Passport Office, but the break in work Covid afforded allowed a lot of senior managers to put time into DAP and get it ready.”

However, it was not ready in time for an influx of applications lodged as travel restrictions eased, which saw 7.2 million passports requested in the first nine months of 2022 – a quarter up on the same period before the pandemic.

Estimated waiting times were raised from five weeks to 10 weeks, but the lengthened target was being missed in 5 per cent of cases and hundreds of thousands of people were left waiting for months.

Strike action last year resulted in thousands of Passport Office staff walking out in a dispute over pay and conditions, which also affected passport delays - Wiktor Szymanowicz/Future Publishing

“It was an absolute nightmare – there were huge waiting times, rooms full of documents,” the official recalls. “A lot of short-term staff were taken on to try to help clear all the work but they needed a lot of training and we were running to play catch-up.”

The official admits that “the bad service people got in the immediate aftermath of Covid can’t be justified”.

“We should have been able to roll DAP out while delivering a better service,” they add.

The new digital system, which allows people to submit their details and photos online, has now almost completely replaced the archaic former process that saw paper forms scanned onto a database by a private contractor before being read by officials.

“Reading people’s squiggly writing was hellish, we had to go all the way through every single application,” the official recalls. “Now DAP detects what parts of the form require attention and it only presents those to the passport officer. It makes the process much quicker, it’s working.”

Other countries are taking note of the system’s impact, with delegations of officials being sent to HMPO from countries including the US and Taiwan to learn lessons from its successful implementation.

DAP was developed in-house by HMPO, setting it apart from disastrous outsourced IT projects such as the introduction of accounting software by the Post Office, which was handed over to Fujitsu and led to the wrongful conviction of hundreds of subpostmasters.

As the new system sped up processing, the demand for passports started falling below forecast levels and capacity was freed up even more.

“Into 2023 they expected a huge number of people to come in with applications, but there were far fewer [applications] than projected,” the official says. “We suspect it’s because cost of living problems meant people weren’t going on holiday abroad.”

Demand is now running in line with the expected level of around 7 million applications a year, but civil servants do not rule out future events that could “send everything out the window” once more.

The civil servant who led the Passport Office during the transformation, Abi Tierney, has been credited with much of the improvement. After being appointed as director general of the HMPO in February 2020, she was viewed as a capable and effective leader by colleagues and politicians.

“Abi was absolutely solid. She knew about the operational delivery part, she understood how to get processing done and she set very strong parameters for her team,” a former minister says. “She was first class and an outstanding leader within the department.”

Abi Tierney was appointed as director general of the HMPO in February 2020 and has been credited with turning the department around - Jordan Pettitt/PA

HMPO’s rapid turnaround quelled threats from some Tories, including then prime minister Boris Johnson, to privatise the organisation. A flurry of political briefings in April 2022 suggested Johnson would “privatise the arse” off the Passport Office if performance did not improve, and he later told a television interview: “I’m not going to rule anything out. It is about delivering value for money and getting costs down.”

The former minister says the statements provoked “panic” about the future of HMPO but “resources were allocated accordingly” to fix processing delays before more concrete privatisation plans could develop.

In recognition of Tierney’s success in passports, visas and immigration, her responsibilities were expanded to cover asylum in 2022 and she was then made Home Office ethics adviser in June 2023.

Weeks later, Tierney announced she was leaving the civil service to become the first chief executive of the Welsh Rugby Union, surprising colleagues by departing at the peak of her powers.

The passport official insists Tierney did not “shake up” the department, and says the crucial DAP system had been in the works for years before Tierney’s arrival.

The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), which represents passport workers, credits its members with “turning the situation around”.

“Through their hard work and dedication, they have created a hugely efficient passport system that other countries are now looking to learn from,” Fran Heathcote, the general secretary, says.

“This success story shows what happens when you place trust in an efficient workforce – one that is encouraged to innovate, overcome challenges and deliver world-leading services at great value to the public.”

HMPO is now out-performing its targets so consistently that it is loaning staff to other parts of the Home Office, including to help with record asylum backlogs.

“Passports are working extremely well now,” says one beleaguered asylum official. “This is one of the few great stories where the Home Office was able to learn from its mistakes.”

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