Passport blunders cost £350,000
Thursday, March 8th, 2007The 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?
