One in five Passport Office staff still working from home despite summer chaos – The Telegraph

One in five Passport Office staff are still working from home, despite warnings that the practice contributed to holiday chaos over the summer.

Passport Office managers admitted that the number of employees not in the office was currently higher than at the height of the travel turmoil.

They also revealed that the lengthened processing time of up to 10 weeks, introduced during the pandemic, will be kept until at least next spring.

Thomas Greig, a director at the Passport Office, said 21 per cent of staff were working from home, compared to 13 per cent in the summer. He described that number as low and said it fell to 15 per cent “when you look at people engaged in actual passport production”.

Appearing before MPs, Mr Greig  admitted that the quango does not hold any data on whether home workers are as productive as office staff, saying that was because the computer system that employees use cannot tell where they are logging in from.

But he insisted bosses “don’t have concerns about the impact of working from home on the productivity of the Passport Office”, adding: “Where we have a limited number of teams who are purely home working, we don’t see any difference in their productivity”.

‘Didn’t provide a good enough service’

This month, a National Audit Office report concluded that working from home led to passport office delays that jeopardised the travel plans of at least 360,000 Britons.

It found that remote working contributed to a delay in completing a new digital system for processing applications that was due to have been finished before the crisis blew up.

That meant the system could not handle the sudden post-pandemic surge in applications from millions of travellers seeking to renew their passports in the spring.

The Passport Office’s customer service system also collapsed under the pressure, with many desperate holidaymakers forced to go to their MPs for help.

Mr Greig admitted the organisation “didn’t provide a good enough service” to many people who had “lost confidence, understandably, in the system”.

He also revealed that a text message drive to urge people to renew their passports in good time had failed to make an impact. Officials sent messages to people whose documents were approaching expiry, but only 3.4 per cent of recipients acted on them.

“People may have thought it was a scam,” said Mr Greig, adding that the Passport Office would focus more on social media campaigns in future.

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