Home Secretary Theresa May has unveiled a string of measures to help clear a backlog of 30,000 outstanding passport applications.

It should take three weeks for most people to get their passports renewed, but MPs have been inundated with complaints from people who fear they will have to cancel their travel plans due to long delays.

Ms May has blamed the problem on an unexpected surge in demand for passports. The Home Office says there were 350,000 more applications to Her Majesty’s Passport Office (HMPO) from January to May than would normally be expected.

The department insists it has a grip on this problem, but FactCheck has learned that orders from on high have so far failed to trickle down to the passport offices, leading to more confusion and frustration for people still waiting for their documents.

“Where people have an urgent need to travel, HMPO has agreed to upgrade them… and HMPO has agreed to upgrade those people free of charge.”
Theresa May, 12 June 2014

This was one of the big announcements in Mrs May’s speech to the House of Commons on Thursday.

Normally you would have to pay an average of about £100 extra to get your application fast-tracked. But it appears that this will now be done free of charge.

Mrs May unveiled this new policy in the morning but it was not until late in the evening that the details appeared on the government’s passport website:

So it looks like you are eligible for a free upgrade if:

• You have already been waiting for three weeks for your passport, through no fault of your own
• You need to travel in the next seven days and can provide proof of booking
• You applied by post from within the UK
• But it doesn’t apply to adults applying for their first passport, unless there are compassionate grounds

The official advice says: “The upgrade is available immediately and can be requested through the Passport Adviceline.”

Unfortunately that doesn’t square with reality.

FactCheck called the phone number in question (0300 222 0000). After lengthy waits and requests for callbacks that never came, we managed to speak to an operator.

She told us the upgrade was only available for people whose “urgent need to travel” meant something like a death in the family, an emergency, a funeral or urgent government business.

That was news to us: we had assumed that “urgent need to travel” covered everyone who has flights booked in the next few days.

But we were told categorically that simply having a holiday booked for the next seven days would not mean you get your application fast-tracked for free.

When we made a second call to the same helpline we got a different response to our request for clarification on who qualifies for the upgrade.

“We have not been briefed on it yet,” the operator told us candidly. “It is in the pipeline but it is not set in stone yet.”

The Home Office later told us that the offer of free fast-tracking does apply to holidaymakers too (provided they have been waiting for more than three weeks through no fault of their own and are due to travel in seven days).

But it is obvious that this has not been made to clear to the men and women manning the advice line. At time of writing, people who are anxious about having to cancel flights and want the free upgrade are getting completely the wrong information from the passport service.

“People might say that this is about reduced staff numbers, but actually staff numbers have been going up over the past two years.”
Theresa May, 12 June 2014

Are cuts to blame for the delays? That’s the line from Labour and the unions, but Ms May told MPs: “The answer is not just to throw more staff at the problem.”

She told the House of Commons that staffing levels have actually gone up at HMPO recently, rising from 3,104 in March 2012 to 3,445 this year.

It’s interesting to note that the government seems keen to acknowlegde bolstering passport office staff by about 300, when it didn’t want to acknowledge the existence of extra jobs at the time.

As we found back in 2012, about 300 vacancies were created in the passport service and 800 in the UK Border Force after the PCS union threatened to strike over job losses weeks before the Olympic Games.

The government initially denied the existence of these posts, with the immigration minister, Damian Green, saying: “No new jobs have been advertised since the union threatened to strike.”

We pointed out that hundreds of jobs had appeared on the civil service website the day after the union announced its plans for industrial action.

The Home Office blamed the confusion on “administrative error”. Now the government is rather more keen to publicise the fact that it has recruited hundreds of extra passport workers over the last two years.

But there has still been a cut.

Home Office accounts show that the then-Identity and Passport Service had 4,017 staff just before the last election. So about 600 posts have been lost overall since then.

The government’s answer to this is that scrapping the last government’s plans for ID cards meant it had more staff on the books than it needed in 2010. But do the number add up?

We asked the Home Office how many people tasked to work on ID cards and not passports were axed, and we were told no figure was available as staff were employed on a flexible basis, not to undertake one specific role.

While it’s true that the workforce has gone up since 2012,  the workload has also grown, as the Home Office has now taken over responsibility for dealing with passport applications from UK nationals living abroad from the Foreign Office.

This means staff will have to deal with an additional 350,000 applications over the whole financial year 2014/15.