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were introduced and the old ones were withdrawn—but in Bristol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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