Which one is the best value?

You’re currently required to go for a face-to-face passport interview, in a £115m scheme set up by the Government, and which helped push the price of your passport from £42 in 2005, up to £72.

The Daily Mail reports that of the 216,581 people who were interviewed in the 12 months up to July, none were found to be applying fraudulently.

Liberal Democrat Peer Lord Roberts of Llandudno, who obtained the figures, said the interviews “have not achieved what they were supposed to do. There have been over 200,000 interviews and zero rejections. What is the point of them? The millions of pounds spent on this project was a total waste of money.”

Security minister Lord West insisted that the interviews “act as a protection for British citizens against one form of identity theft.”

So if forking out £72 and travelling miles to an interview centre doesn’t appeal, the second option is to wait for a passport simply to fall into your lap.

The Daily Mail reports that “FIVE passports are lost in the post every day by Home Office” and says that this has “raised fears they may have fallen into the hands of terrorists or fraudsters.”

The story quotes figures uncovered by the Liberal Democrats showing that a total of 12,200 passports were lost in the post by government officials between 2001 and 2007.

Chris Huhne, Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary said,

“We all know that things can go missing, but these figures again demonstrate an almost institutionalised carelessness.

“It beggars belief that a secure courier service can be losing passports in transit at the rate of two a day.

“People will be rightly concerned that the Government cannot be trusted with something as personal as a passport.”

From the “you really couldn’t make it up” school of government administration:

1. The Government spots there is a problem with bogus passport applications.
2. The Government introduces a £93 million scheme to tighten up security on passport applications.
3. This includes blanket interviewing of 38,391 people when they apply for their passport.
4. Of these, 99.4% are given the go ahead to get their passport, and only 0.6% are referred on for further checks. Oh, and none of those ongoing checks have yet found a fraudulent application.

Chris Huhne, the Liberal Democrat home affairs spokesman, said: “It was predictable that this would be a costly and unnecessary scheme and so it has proved. The best solution is for immigration officials to have the right to conduct interviews in some circumstances but they are clearly not needed in every case.”

Worth a read:

John Lettice explains in The Register why the new chip-enabled passports could, for the moment at least, give people a quick and easy way to cross borders with a forged passport.

So much for extra security.

Joan Ryan today announced that 10,000 fraudulent passport applicants were granted passports in the last year. Dhiren Barot, serving 40 years in prison, apparently had 7 fraudulent passports.

Of course, they’re telling us this to convince the British public that ID cards are necessary. Is this the first time the government has boasted about its own failures just to sell another policy?

The thing that really troubles me, however, is that Joan Ryan’s ministerial statement says:

0.25% of applications (equivalent to 16,500 fraudulent passport applications a year) were believed to be from people attempting to obtain a passport fraudulently. Almost half of these applications were stopped.

But the press release says:

IPS detected some 6,500 attempted frauds last year.

In what world is 6,500 half of 16,500?

The Identity and Passport Service has paid out £350,000 in compensation to travellers who have had to cancel their holidays because of delays in getting hold of a passport. The story - which came out thanks to a Freedom of Information request by the Press Association - is here.

OK, so it’s only half a percent of all applications, and OK, so there weren’t as many mishaps last year than the year before. But the IPS’s reputation is so frequently burnished with ministerial praise (better customer satisfaction than Tesco, don’t you know) that it’s worth pointing out that the agency isn’t in fact perfect.

Let’s not forget these revelations that 1,000 passports are lost in the post every year. Or last year’s revelations that IPS staff have been detected hacking into internal computer systems on four separate occasions. Need I go on?