Hello, this is Simon Calder, welcoming you to today's independent travel podcast, as well,

where's my passport, which is gripped tightly in my hand. And that's because, well, there's been a

lot around about passports. Yesterday, I was a witness at the Home Affairs Select Committee,

which was a interesting experience.

I was there to give evidence, as it were, on behalf of the traveller,

about the terrible times that so many people are having,

trying to get those all-important travel documents really in time for the holidays.

And the committee heard that the delay is currently

for 10 weeks or more which is the deadline set by the passport office itself there's 55,000

passports in the system that are longer than that.

In addition, they are very, very upset that the company Teleperformance, which handles the passport device line, wasn't there.

The reason that Teleperformance gave was that we've got no control over the processing and delivery of passports.

We only support customer communications.

We feel that providing information on our service performance and supporting Her Majesty's passport office is more appropriate.

And the chair of the select committee Diana Johnson calls this

response completely unsatisfactory. Anyway, what they have done is come up with five ideas for how

this can be solved. I'm going to run through one to four very quickly for you because I'm

most excited about night number five, not least because it was sort of my idea. There we are.

That's a responsive government for you. Okay, so they want the passport office to engage in

greater proactive management of passport demand and that basically means whenever times

are quiet you've got to get on to people whose passports will expire during a period of peak

demand and offer incentives and they set even slightly longer passport extension to encourage applications

...