Select Committee on Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Written Evidence


Annex

PASSPORT ISSUING PROBLEMS IN 1998

  40.  Attempting to urgently renew a passport via the Newport passport office in autumn 1998, I was confronted by a series of problems associated with the introduction of a set of new computer systems, a new application process, and a rise in demand for passports brought about by a short term social change and a catastrophically timed policy change. The intention of the system change was to introduce machine readable passports, and with it came a change to digital printing of an image of the submitted photo: two changes at once, a story that echoes in the RPA fiasco.

  41.  The new systems were rolled out successively to the passport offices, with Newport being one of the first. It was later suggested to me that the systems were under specified, in that they did not have enough capacity. However, a complicating factor was that an attempt was made to cut over quickly from old system to new, with the inevitable loss of throughput as experience was gained with using the new system.

  42.  At the same time new application forms were introduced and the old ones were withdrawn—but in Bristol the new forms proved impossible to obtain. Post Offices that I tried did not have the new forms, and the other agents, namely Lloyds Bank branches, seemed to know nothing about them[21] and could not get hold of them—I was even told that it took two weeks from ordering to receipt (it should have been 48 hours). After trying for a while on the 'phone, I got through to the Newport Office, where a helpful young man knew exactly what the problem was, took a form from his pile, wrote out an envelope for it—and I got it the next day. And at the same time a colleague foraging near the northern boundary of the city queued and queued in one of the super slow Super Agency Post Offices and struck lucky: they had the new forms.

  43.  My completed application then got stuck in a large backlog. Not only was throughput reduced, but two other factors intervened:

    (a)  That year a larger than expected number of people had decided to take holidays abroad, thus swelling the number of passport applications.

    (b)  A policy change was announced: no further family passports would be issued; instead every individual, down to a babe in arms, was to have his or her own passport. Panic ensued: people wrongly believed that their existing family passports were now obsolete and so they applied for whole sets of passports.

  44.  After putting some pressure on the Newport Office I jumped the queue: a manager found my application in the queue and had it processed quickly.

  45.  Only when I received the passport did I realise that I had a hybrid: new style, but with my submitted photo laminated onto it instead of being scanned and then the image digitally printed—the digital scan and print system was causing them problems, and thus a security feature had been temporarily withdrawn.

THE AUTHOR

  46.  The author of this submission is an independent consultant in ICT strategy and secure solution design, with particular interest in smart cards and associated secure terminal equipment. He has contributed to several European pre-standardisation and standardisation projects in this area, and was contracted in 1999-2000 to carry out a technical edit on the UK Government smart cards Modernising Government Framework.[22] He has also been a Director of the ITSO[23] management company, and is currently consulting on a public sector travel concession pass project compliant with the ITSO specification and method. During the 1990s he managed a company providing technical services and equipment to the Mondex e-money card project and related banking projects.

May 2006






















21   One branch that did have some forms eventually managed to get to them in their store-but they gave me the wrong form. Back

22   Smart Cards Framework found on the fourth page at http://www.govtalk.gov.uk/archive/archive.asp?librarydocs=5 Back

23   Integrated Transport Smart card Organisation, responsible for developing and managing the specification and support services for the DfT-sponsored and mandated electronic ticketing method for public transport www.itso.org.uk Back


 
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