If anyone’s interested, as well as my wife’s (13 days Hemel Hempstead) we have three other family member passport renewals in the last fortnight:
1. Bootle, adult renewal 12 days from initial application, new one delivered 5 April, a week after the old passport was delivered to HMPO.
2. Bootle, child renewal, applied the same day, printed on 8 April, now en route.
3. Bootle, adult renewal but requiring maiden to married name changed, applied the same day as 1. and 2., email to say it was being printed 8 April. The human intervention to check marriage certificate seems to have had an impact of only about 4 days.
Both 2. and 3. should be delivered by 12 April, exactly 14 days after all three applications’ old passports were delivered to HMPO Bootle.
The Independent has a story though that the 10-week rule is going to stay, clearly so HMPO can cover its back: https://www.independent.co.uk/travel/news-and-advice/passport-office-10-week-rule-b2316573.html
Here’s an extract if you can’t access that:
Today, three in 1,000 applications take longer than 10 weeks. And, according to Matthew Rycroft – permanent secretary at the Home Office – there are no plans for reducing the target time to its pre-Covid level.
“We have actually decided to keep it at 10 weeks,” he told MPs. “We know that it will be spiky and there will be times when it will take the full 10 weeks.
“We are going to keep the 10 weeks, because we know we will need that flexibility at some point during the year.”
Interestingly the same story refers to people unofficially holding two or more UK passports. Apparently, short of manually checking against names, HMPO has no way of checking if people have two passports. Certainly sounds like a way round the renewal problem – but I’m amazed it happens.
