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Mr. David Maclean (Penrith and The Border): I intervene because, as my right hon. Friend made those remarks, the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for North Warwickshire (Mr. O'Brien), was shaking his head. I find it offensive to receive a letter from the Minister at the weekend enclosing a photograph that shows a passport office with no queue around it. Through my right hon. Friend I ask the Minister when that photograph was taken--was it using infra-red technology at 2 o'clock in the morning?

Miss Widdecombe: I am delighted to pass on that question. I assume that the photograph was taken at public

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expense and I wonder what the point of it was. Surely the Minister should have responded to the precise query sensibly and not with a gimmick.

Mr. Bill O'Brien: Will the right hon. Lady give way?

Miss Widdecombe: In a minute. Perhaps the Secretary of State--

Mr. O'Brien: Will the right hon. Lady give way?

Miss Widdecombe: The whole House heard me say, "In a minute." If the hon. Gentleman did not, he will find that I will not give way to him at all.

Perhaps the Secretary of State will tell us about the cost of that gimmick and the reply and give my right hon. Friend the Member for Penrith and The Border (Mr. Maclean) a clear answer about when the photograph was taken and under what circumstances.

Why has it taken so long for the Minister to wake up to the fact that many passport offices were not working at the weekends and around the clock and taking extra measures to reduce the queues and accommodate more people?

Does the Minister recall the purpose of the Passport Agency? Its main aim is set out in its terms of reference, which state that its duty is to provide passport services for British nationals in the United Kingdom promptly and economically. The terms of reference continue that the turnround time should be 10 days.

The Passport Agency has a number of key performance targets and one is to

"Turn around applications in 15 working days in April, and 10 days for the rest of the year".

To say that that target has been missed is to make an understatement. In Glasgow, the average processing time for correctly completed, straightforward applications--not even the complex ones--that are submitted in person and so have not gone astray is not 10 but 39 working days; in Newport, it is 38 days; in Belfast, it is 37 days; in Liverpool, it is 36 days; and in Peterborough, it is 33 days.

Mr. Andrew Robathan (Blaby): My constituents, Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong, have now been waiting well over seven weeks. They sent their applications by special delivery to Peterborough, so the figures that my right hon. Friend has been given may not be 100 per cent. correct.

Miss Widdecombe: I am inclined to ask whether performance pay is tied up with some of those targets. The real performance under examination, however, is that of the Ministers who, even when confronted with the growing evidence of those sorts of waiting times and the distress that they were causing, took refuge in the statement that only 50 families have not got their passports at all and in 99.9 per cent. of cases the passport offices manage to get the passport out. Does the Secretary of State acknowledge that in that statement he is completely ignoring the hoops and antics that people have to go through to get their passports in the first place? It is no boast to say, "We gave this person his passport", if he has waited a large number of weeks instead of 10 days, had to queue for anything up to eight hours and if all that

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came about because the Government caused the situation through the combination of their policy on children's passports and on new technology.

Now that the hon. Member for Normanton(Mr. O'Brien) has been patient, I will give way to him.

Mr. O'Brien: Well, the right hon. Lady took interventions from two Members of her own party before I could get in to speak--and the right hon. Lady says that she is fair. May I say to her that she was misleading the House--[Interruption.]--

Madam Speaker: Order. No right hon. or hon. Member misleads this House, as the hon. Gentleman knows. Will he withdraw that remark and rephrase his question?

Mr. O'Brien: I make the point that the right hon. Lady is not misleading the House--[Interruption.]

Madam Speaker: Order. I take it that the hon. Gentleman is withdrawing his earlier point.

Mr. O'Brien: Yes, the right hon. Lady is not misleading the House, but she said that it was only from today that 300 people had been recruited to attend to the delays in passports. I advise her that the Passport Agency recruited 300 people a week ago to attend to those delays. I also advise her that my residence in London is near Petty France; for 16 years, during the time that the Conservative Government were in power, there have always been queues outside the passport office. Every day, for 16 years, there have been queues outside the passport office. If the right hon. Lady wants to comment on that issue, we should have the true facts.

Miss Widdecombe: I am so glad that I took that most helpful intervention.

Mr. Michael Fabricant (Lichfield): Will my right hon. Friend give way?

Miss Widdecombe: Let me finish dealing with the intervention of the hon. Member for Normanton and then I will come to my hon. Friend.

I asked some specific questions on my visit today. I asked what was normal, and what would normally be expected at this time of year. In addition to the figures that show the huge rise in the number of applications and of people waiting, and in the number of queues, I was told by staff at the Passport Agency--many of whom had worked there for several years--that they had never seen anything like this before.

I asked the manager to compare the current situation to what he would expect if there had not been the rise in applications for children's passports and the chaos caused by the technology problem. He said that two extremely long queues would not normally be there. One queue was there because work had been shifted from other offices due to the technology failure; the other was there because people were coming to the office to get their passports because of the publicity surrounding the Government's failures. One of the queues was extremely long and most

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people were joining it. Without those two queues, people would not have been outside the office, in the rain, since dawn.

There is no doubt that, from time to time, there is a queue for a short period, but to queue from dawn is not normal. The length of that queue, from dawn, is not normal. The testimony from the passport office today was that none of that was normal.

Mr. Fabricant: It would seem that I have the misfortune to live in the vicinity of the hon. Member for Normanton (Mr. O'Brien). I can inform my right hon. Friend that I walk to the House of Commons every day, through Petty France. Usually, there are short queues on Tuesday mornings only. I am sure that the hon. Gentleman would not want deliberately to mislead the House, but I can say that there have been queues every day--not only on Tuesday mornings--and that they wrap round and join up in a continuous circle. I suspect that the hon. Gentleman would like to withdraw his question; he knows that it was untrue.

Miss Widdecombe: I am tempted to give the hon. Member for Normanton a second chance, because the first intervention was extremely helpful.

Mr. Bill O'Brien rose--

Miss Widdecombe: Tempted as I am to give way to the hon. Gentleman, I do want to make some progress.

I want the Secretary of State to answer some simple questions. Let us give him the benefit of the doubt by allowing that the measure on children's passports was desirable. However, what prevented him from postponing the implementation of that measure until the computer system had been sorted out?

Is it true that the Home Secretary is paying Siemens case by case? Has the company incurred a net penalty as a result of its recent failure, or has it continued to make profits because of the rise in applications, owing to the necessity of children having to have their own passport? Will he state clearly to the House the increase in revenue to the Passport Agency that has resulted from the requirement for children and babies to have their own passport? Will he state why no back-up systems were in place when the computer technology was introduced? Will he state why, when it became evident that the computer technology was going wrong, he did not then--at that time, not a week ago--embark on immediate action to get the extra staff and allocate the extra hours that would be necessary to avert a problem?

Does the Home Secretary accept that the number of people who are brushed off with an answering machine message--1.1 million, which represents a tenfold increase since January and a doubling since last month--is unacceptable? Will he tell us what he proposes to do to make sure that people are not encouraged to come to London to swell the ranks of people queueing at the Passport Agency simply by being unable to get an answer when they ring up with a perfectly routine query? Does he accept that the present situation is unusual, or does he go along with his hon. Friend the Under-Secretary in saying that there is no crisis, and anyway, if there is one, the general public caused it?

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