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Mr. MacShane: If people book their holidays in December and they are aware that they or their children require passports, why can they not apply for them in January, February, March or April?
Mr. Clappison: The hon. Gentleman must concede that members of the public could reasonably expect to have received their passports much sooner. I listened to the hon. Gentleman's rather curious explanation as to why more people are holidaying abroad. I have mentioned my family, but I am not pleading my own case because we
may take only a short break abroad this year. I enjoy my holiday at the English seaside, and I had a wonderful time last year in Devon. I shall not take any lectures from the hon. Gentleman and new Labour about where I should spend my summer holidays. We are as likely to find followers of new Labour at the English seaside as we are to see the Minister for the Cabinet Office travelling economy class.
Mr. Maclean: I hope that my hon. Friend will condemn more strongly the outrageous comments of the hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane). It is yet another example of the Government trying to blame the public: it is their fault for wanting to go on holiday. Some of my constituents applied for passports last November, in January and in February--and they are still waiting. Blaming the public is grubby and unacceptable and it is beneath the hon. Member for Geneva.
Mr. Clappison: I think I may have been a little harsh with the hon. Member for Rotherham (Mr. MacShane). I am sure that he will tell us in due course that he makes an annual trek to the Blackpool illuminations and the sands of Scarborough.
Sir Robert Smith: It is not only holiday makers who are affected. My office received a telephone call today from parents who are extremely worried because their daughter is due to travel abroad on Sunday with a guide trip and she has not yet received her passport. The hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) made a very important point: the uncertainty is damaging people's holiday plans. People look forward to that yearly event, whether it is a holiday or a guide trip abroad.
Mr. Clappison: We should not underestimate the real hardship and anxiety that the delays will cause. It has prompted people to take days off work in order to make long journeys to passport offices. For example, today's edition of the Evening Standard reports that a man arrived at the London passport office at 2.30 am to get a passport for his six-year-old daughter so that she can travel abroad with her class. We need to take into account how much anxiety the situation is causing our constituents. It is no good our constituents being told that they are panicking. It is understandable that people experience anxiety in those circumstances, especially when they are planning to take their young children abroad--they are not panicking.
We have been reassured that people will be able to telephone passport offices, and there have been calls for more telephone facilities. I hope that those who telephone the passport offices will have more joy than the thousands of overseas visitors who, we hear, were telephoning the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, which is in chaos, to try to get back their passports. In a written answer to me, the Under-Secretary said that every day in March, 42,000 calls were made to the Immigration and Nationality Directorate, but only 1,637 were answered. I was also told:
It is not much consolation to be told that MPs should get in touch with passport offices. When we contacted
the Under-Secretary about the problems experienced by overseas visitors with the IND, he wrote back on 5 March to tell us that
Mr. Clappison:
My hon. Friend is absolutely right. Of course MPs of all parties will do their best to help their constituents, but we should not rely on MPs having to take up such cases, especially when there are, as we have heard, 500,000 cases outstanding. That merely channels people from one queue to another.
People in the queue will not draw much consolation from the time scale proposed by the Minister in a letter to Members. He has been praised for all the letters that he has written to us. In his letter of 10 June, he concluded:
I do not want to be unkind to the Minister because he has had a lot on his plate. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Allan) referred to the parallel problems in the Immigration and Nationality Directorate concerning overseas visitors who are experiencing delays in getting back their passports. Queues have lengthened in the immigration and asylum system.
As I said to the Minister earlier, he is perfectly fair and does not discriminate: the queue for people trying to get out of the country is as long as that for people trying to stay in the country. The hon. Gentleman has displayed such great aptitude for preventing anybody from going anywhere that he would be a natural candidate for Minister for prison security. Nobody would want to escape because the queue would be too long, and in any case, any would-be escapers would be let out much earlier by the Minister because of early release and tagging schemes.
Mr. Denis MacShane (Rotherham):
I am glad to follow the hon. Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison), who made some very good and sensible points.
This has been a useful debate. Despite the fact that we all read that the House of Commons never affects what the Government want to do, I expect that my hon. Friend the Under-Secretary, and my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, would rather that this debate had not taken place. Perhaps it has accelerated some management decisions that needed to be taken.
Now that we are in calmer waters, the queue to speak is much shorter than those outside passport offices, and the Front-Bench cruisers have left the Chamber for a cup of tea--one of them, my right hon. Friend the Home Secretary, has just returned--perhaps we can discuss the matter seriously. I am glad that we have a Home Secretary who is prepared to say sorry and accept responsibility in the House of Commons. That is one heck of a change from the previous Administration.
It disappointed me that the right hon. Member for Maidstone and The Weald (Miss Widdecombe) did not offer a single solution. She is wallowing in the publicity of going down to the queues in Petty France, but not proposing one--just one--solution. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Allan) proposed some solutions, the hon. Member for Hertsmere proposed some, but the right hon. Lady, who is no longer in her place, did not propose one.
In her attack on the Passport Agency, I was not sure whether the right hon. Lady was demanding that it should be re-nationalised--I wonder whether that is the new Conservative policy--or that it should be totally privatised. Perhaps it can be sold to Harrods and we can all go there to get a passport in a brown paper bag from Mr. Al Fayed.
We should set this debate in a slightly broader context. A century ago, it would not have happened; we did not need passports then. When Palmerston said 150 years ago that all people had to say was "Civis Britannicus sum" and the might of Britain would defend them, one did not have to carry a passport. Passports are a product of 20th century state bureaucracy and were introduced after the first world war.
"Many calls are repeat calls and, therefore, these statistics must be approached with caution".--[Official Report, 17 May 1999; Vol. 331, c. 261.]
The Government draw consolation from that fact.
"it is disappointing to note that the number of enquiries from MPs has risen over the recent period by a factor of around 25 per cent. As I said in my letter of 12 January, it is to an extent in Members' hands how long it takes IND to return to normal levels of productivity. I would appreciate your help in ensuring that this happens by Easter."
Mr. Nigel Waterson (Eastbourne):
Does my hon. Friend share my slight unease that MPs should have that fast-track approach? Of course we are here to help our constituents--in the past few days, I have been able to help a constituent of mine with such a problem, and I am grateful for the help that we received from officials--but what about those members of the public who do not think of approaching their MP, or who have an MP who is not as available or as assiduous as all the hon. Members now present in the Chamber?
"The problem is only temporary and we believe that it will be resolved in the very near future."
The Minister's time scale will be rather different from that of our constituents, who want to go on their holidays in July and August and for whom it will not be much consolation if the matter is resolved by September.
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