House of Commons - Her Majesty's Passport Office: delays in processing applications

Her Majesty's Passport Office: delays in processing applications - Home Affairs Committee Contents

4 Offices and staffing

51. There is no doubt about the dedication, commitment and hard work of HM Passport Office's frontline staff. As Paul Pugh told us:

52. We acknowledge that this crisis placed a significant burden on the staff of HM Passport Office and applaud them for their efforts, which have helped to minimise the consequences of the unexpected surge in demand.

Staffing resources

53. When the problem of delays first emerged, it was initially posited that this was due to a reduction both in the number of offices and the number of staff. On 9 June, the PCS union wrote to Paul Pugh blaming the delays on "major job cuts and office closures during the past five years", as well as the increased use of private companies. The letter stated that 22 interview offices and one application processing centre had closed in recent years, with 315 staff - a tenth of the workforce - losing their jobs. The Union did not accept that the current problems could solely be down to unusual demand and was considering industrial action over the issue.[52]

54. Mike Jones, Home Office Group Secretary, PCS, told us that the backlog was "clearly down to staffing", citing the loss of 550 jobs and the closure of 22 offices since 2010.[53] Paul Pugh pointed to the seasonal nature of the work and argued that under-employment had been a significant problem in the past, when staff were forced to fill their time "tidying the office, keeping things up-to-date, filing, in some cases reading books".[54]

OFFICE CLOSURES AND STAFF REDUCTIONS

55. The Identity and Passport Service[55]Annual Report and Accounts 2012-13 states that the Agency was on course to meet its Spending Review target to be self-funded on core operations, and had implemented plans to reduce administrative costs by 33% by the end of the Spending Review period in 2014-15.[56] In the CEO foreword, Paul Pugh states "The [passport] fee has gone down by £5, a direct result of the efficiency measures we have taken since 2010, which saw a reduction in costs by £80m, decreased the space we occupy by nearly 30% and reduced our headcount by 20%".[57]

56. When he gave evidence to us, Mr Pugh said that the size of the organisation had in fact increased by roughly 300 people in the last two years,[58] and that it was actively recruiting new staff above the levels required to manage natural turnover.[59] The Home Secretary told us that on 31 March this year, HMPO had 3,444 full-time equivalent staff, up from 3,260 in 2013 and 3,104 in 2012.[60] Mike Jones described these figures as "very misleading", arguing that, notwithstanding the increase in staff numbers between 2012 and March 2014, there had still been an overall net reduction of 550 staff since 2010.[61] He suggested that HMPO's business model, which he described as being dependent on "copious amounts of overtime, which burns out staff" was primarily to blame for the crisis.[62]

IDENTITY CARDS AND THE NATIONAL IDENTITY SERVICE

57. Part of the complication with comparing staff numbers in HMPO over a period of time is that it is a changed organisation, with different responsibilities to its predecessor body, the Identity and Passport Service, of 2010. The Home Secretary told the House that, once the ID cards programme was terminated, "it was possible to take action both in relation to staff numbers and to the closure of certain premises. … Those measures were taken because HMPO had too much office space after we scrapped ID cards".[63] Mike Jones, on the other hand, claimed that HMPO had to be staffed at the 2010 level. He told us that the comparison was not accurate:

We need to go back to the 2010 figure because we need that amount of staff … we are in a crisis now because we do not have enough jobs; people are working excessive overtime for month and month on end.[64]

STAFF NUMBERS AS AT JUNE 2014

58. Due to the confusion as to the level of staffing over the years, we requested information on the number of staff employed by HMPO from January 2010 to the present. This has been summarised in Figure 1:

Figure 1: Number of full time equivalent (FTE) staff employed by HMPO

Source: Extracted from letter from Paul Pugh, Chief Executive, HM Passport Office, 20 June 2014 (WPO0002)

59. The data shows that between March 2010 and March 2014 the number of full time equivalent staff employed by both elements of HMPO had fallen by 548. During this time the number of staff fell steadily from 4,017.52 FTE in March 2010 until it reached the lowest amount of 3,103.83 FTE in September 2012. This amounts to a reduction of 913.69 FTE. Since September 2012, the number of staff has steadily grown to 3,506.36 in May 2014, an increase of 402.53 FTE.

60. Based on the figures of the number of staff, we cannot agree with the statement of PCS that the backlog in processing applications "is clearly down to staffing". If that were the case, delays would have been experienced in previous years when fewer people were employed in HMPO. However, questions remain over whether HMPO have the right number of staff, and the right mix to deal with peaks in demand.

OVERTIME

61. Mike Jones claimed that HMPO had moved to a business model which reduced staffing to a shoestring, and was supplemented by using massive amounts of overtime to try to compensate.[65] When we pressed Mr Jones further on the use of overtime, he said:

We are obviously getting feedback from our members … dating back from January where overtime has been used to an excess. … There have been [previous] backlogs and there have been problems. … Our members have been working really hard to manage a ship that has been sinking for years and it has eventually come to a crisis point now.[66]

62. At our follow-up evidence session on 8 July, Paul Pugh said that it was important to see overtime costs within the overall context of the Agency's pay costs. Staff and pay costs accounted for about 25% overall of HMPO's running costs as an organisation, so overtime costs were a very small proportion of overall costs.[67]

63. Similarly, we requested from HMPO the costs for overtime from January 2010 to the present. This has been summarised in Table 4:Table 4: HMPO overtime costs

2011 2012 2013 2014

January — £46,498 £105,137 £199,146

February — £84,342 £67,582 £400,812

March — £569,117 £369,397 £840,588

April — £436,686 £407,202 £793,559

May — £702,602 £581,587 £964,742

June — £682,474 £477,902 —

July — £229,527 £342,479 —

August — £466,549 £227,851 —

September — £138,918 £123,480 —

October — £109,030 £94,474 —

November £196,538 £73,558 £93,127 —

December £61,035 £78,017 £84,145 —

Total N/A £3,617,318 £2,974,363 £3,198,847

Source: Extracted from letter from Paul Pugh, Chief Executive, HM Passport Office, 20 June 2014 (WPO0002)

64. The data shows that in 2014, more has been spent on overtime in January to May than in the whole of 2013. Additionally, when comparing month by month, the amount spent on overtime in each month of 2014 is of a significantly greater than in the same month in previous years.

65. Based on the figures for overtime, it is clear that the use of overtime to deal with peaks in demand has proved unsustainable this year. This again raises the question of whether HMPO have the right number of staff, and the right mix to deal with peaks in demand. We recommend that future additional jobs should be located, where possible, in areas that suffered from previous job losses in the Passport Office.

Management relations with PCS union, and the prospect of a strike

66. Mike Jones was scathing about the way in which HMPO responded to concerns raised by the union. He said that the Union had "consistently been given the brush off" and, although some discussions had taken place, there had been "no genuine attempt to address the issues properly". He said that two letters to Mr Pugh had not received a response or even been acknowledged.[68] Mr Pugh, by contrast, described his relations with many representatives of the Union as "extremely good". He said that he regularly met union representatives when he visited regional offices, and he had invited national representatives to attend a management board meeting in late 2013, where a constructive discussion took place. He said that he did not recognise the picture of poor staff morale presented by Mr Jones:

Now, clearly I am very happy to listen to the views that Mr Jones has to put about the picture of our organisation as he perceives it, but I do not believe that the PCS union are the sole means by which the views of staff within the organisation are legitimately expressed."[69]

67. Mike Jones told us that the Union had a number of areas where it wanted to negotiate with management—staffing levels, the use of overtime, levels of pay, and privatisation. In particular, PCS was looking to secure the creation of 600 new jobs and for HMPO management to guarantee that there would be no further privatisation. He said that the Union had no current plans for industrial action, but that "if we are continually ignored we will go out to our members and ask them whether they are prepared to take action if they feel that that is necessary".[70]

68. On Monday 28 July, Passport Office staff went on strike over staff shortages. PCS General Secretary, Mark Serwotka said, "The staffing crisis in the Passport Office has been obvious for everyone to see and it shouldn't have taken a committee of MPs to force the chief executive to meet us to discuss it. We are still a long way off getting a commitment from the agency that it will work with us to put the proper resources in place to ensure these backlogs do not reoccur year after year."[71]

We are concerned that the PCS Union invited its members in HM Passport Office to go on strike. This would cause further problems and delays in processing passport applications. We call on the Union and HMPO management to discuss the issue of adequate staffing, so that a sustainable solution can be negotiated, and call for the restoration of goodwill between management and the Union in this area that is of great importance to UK citizens.

51 Q 106 Back

52 Threat of industrial action over passport office cuts, PCS Press Notice, 9 June 2014 Back

53 Qs 9 and 12-13 Back

54 Q 107-114 Back

55 The predecessor to Her Majesty's Passport Office. See para 3 Back

56 Identity and Passport Service, Annual Report and Accounts 2012-2013, HC 275, p7 Back

57 Identity and Passport Service, Annual Report and Accounts 2012-2013, HC 275, p4 Back

58 Q 166 Back

59 Q 245 Back

60 HC Deb, 18 June 2014, col 1143 Back

61 Q 25-26 Back

62 Q 47 Back