Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. I'm out and about,

but I promise I am stationary for you today. It is Monday the 3rd of April, which means I'm outside

the passport office in central London, Globe House, which is the replacement you might recall if you have a certain number of years behind you for Petty France, which was the passport office in the olden days.

Now, actually, this passport office is completely closed, but not for the reasons you think it is.

I suspect that that reason is because, of course, we have a five-week strike,

beginning today by members of the PCS Union.

This is part of the civil service-wide action that they are taking

and they have, I think, concluded that the best way to attract the public's attention

and perhaps garners some public sympathy is foregoing for passports

and that they hope will put pressure on the government to improve the pay offer. Well, that certainly

seems to be the thinking because the staff, about a thousand of them, in eight passport offices

right across the United Kingdom, will be walking out for five weeks, which a lot of people

would find quite tricky, but, well, the thing is,

they are getting strike pay. And I suspect the idea is, let's get a really high profile group of

workers, and then we will be able to sustain them through this long strike. What does the government

say about this? Well, the government department, which

looks after the passport office, says we're disappointed with the union's decision to strike,

but we're working to manage the impact of it while ensuring we can continue to deliver

vital services to the public with comprehensive contingency plans in place.

I suspect those contingency plans will include, for example,

drafting in maybe senior civil servants from various parts of the government departments

and getting them to work in the more routine aspects of passport processing.

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