'Better communication needed,' says Simon Coveney, to avoid passport application errors

First-time passports take longer at about 30 days and a lot of people haven't checked their passports because they haven't been travelling for the last few years because of Covid.

The State needs to get better at communicating with people to avoid high levels of errors in passport forms which are causing huge delays, Foreign Affairs Minister Simon Coveney has said.

With 195,000 people awaiting the arrival of their passport, Mr Coveney said the system is producing a record number of passports daily, about 5,000, in a bid to deal with the backlog.

Mr Coveney denied his department was blaming people who filled out their forms incorrectly for causing the delays but said it “simply outlined the factual position”. He said so far this year, his department has issued half a million passports, which is 80% of where we were in the whole of last year.

The minister said the system has effectively dramatically increased this year and will probably deal with 1.4 million passports.

The highest number ever before this year was just over 900,000. “So we're talking about in the space of one year, increasing the passport applications by about 50%,” he said. Last month saw 170,000 passports issued which is considerably more than ever before in history, he said.

He said:

We're essentially issuing about 5,000 passports a day. 

"When people are renewing their passports, they will get their passport renewed within 10 days, but actually 43% of those applications get a renewal of their passport within 48 hours.”

However, he said because there are so many people applying for both renewals and new passports at the moment, it is putting some pressure on the system.

He said first-time passports do take longer at about 30 days and he said a lot of people haven't checked their passports because they haven't been travelling for the last few years because of Covid.

“So obviously, we're working through effectively increasing the size and scale of the passport office to respond to that demand. So this summer we'll have 900 people working in the passport office. Last summer it was 460,” he said.

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He said officials are succeeding in reducing turnaround times, from about 40 days at the start of the year, to about 30 days now.

Mr Coveney said the challenge for the system is that of those in the backlog at the moment in terms of first-time passports, 43% of them have a problem in terms of the forms that have been filled out.

“So we need to get better at communicating what the public need to do so that we can reduce that error rate. And of course, we need to try to ensure that everybody who wants to apply for a passport applies online,” he added.