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?