Holidays hang in the balance as families wait nearly 15 weeks for passport renewals

Exclusive: ‘I’m so angry, I sent it off in March,’ says mother of two unable to join her partner on trip home to visit ill father

The Passport Office is currently advising travellers to allow 10 weeks for applications to be processed (PA)

Delays with passport applications are continuing to impact British holidaymakers, with one family waiting nearly 15 weeks for their youngest child’s travel document to be renewed, while another is at risk of losing thousands of pounds spent on flights.

Samantha Antonio submitted passport renewal applications online for her two daughters, aged 15 and 12, on 25 March 2022.

The 49-year-old, who works for a local authority, was planning on travelling to Hungary with her children in August along with her partner, Peter, to stay with his family at their home in a small city outside Budapest. Ms Antonio was keen to renew the girls’ passports, which expired in February, well in advance of the holiday.

As requested, Ms Antonio posted her elder daughter’s expired passport to a passport office in Durham, and that of her younger daughter to an office in Liverpool. She received acknowledgement that both passports were safely received, but then on 6 April the Liverpool office emailed to enquire about a name change for her daughter.

Ms Antonio replied that there was no name change required, pointing out that the name on the renewal application was the same as on her daughter’s birth certificate (which she had previously supplied) and expired passport.

“I wrote a letter and sent it by recorded delivery saying, ‘Why do you think I've changed her name?’,” she tells The Independent.

Having received her elder daughter’s new passport on 22 April, Ms Antonio felt it was safe to book leave from work, though was hesitant to pay for flights for herself or her daughters until receiving all the documents.

More than two months later, she is still waiting for her younger daughter’s document, putting the holiday in jeopardy, even if the passport does come through in time.

“If I’d got it earlier I would have got cheaper flights; I’m now going to pay double the price,” she says.

To add to the stress of the situation, Ms Antonio’s partner’s father suffered a major heart attack in May and is still in hospital in Hungary. Her partner would like her to be able to join him when he visits his parents, but Ms Antonio feels unable to travel without her youngest daughter, who is autistic.

Ms Antonio is experiencing further anxiety because the uncertainty of the situation means that she is not in a position to prepare her daughter for the holiday.

“I have to plan things well in advance with the support of her special needs school. We’ve got picture stories where we explain how we’re going to the airport, what happens when we’re at the airport – all of that has to be in place,” Ms Antonio says.

Her eldest daughter, meanwhile, is very disappointed because she was looking forward to the holiday as a treat for completing her GCSE exams.

Ms Antonio has submitted two letters of complaint to HMO Passport Office but is yet to receive anything other than an automated response. Her attempts to reach the office by phone have also come to nothing: “No one is answering that phone. You sit on that phone forever and a day,” she says.

Ms Antonio is far from the only family likely to have their summer ruined by passport office delays.

Hannah Jackson’s father submitted an application for a passport renewal nearly 11 weeks ago and is yet to receive his travel document. He is due to fly out on holiday this Saturday, and is booked for another trip to Florida at the end of August.

“My mum has spent endless hours on the phone each day to just be told that it’s ‘tough’,” Ms Jackson tells The Independent. “It is likely that this holiday will be cancelled and thousands of pounds will be lost.”

HM Passport Office provides an expedited service where an application from the UK has been with them for longer than 10 weeks; if a customer can prove they’re due to travel within the next fortnight, their case will be prioritised. Ms Jackson’s father tried to access this service, but to no avail.

Delays to passport renewals are also preventing Brits returning home from abroad, with one family facing homelessness in Singapore because their children, aged nine and five, have not been issued new travel documents.

Oliver Lo told the Independent that he had been forced to cancel the family’s flights to London from Singapore because his children’s passport renewals have taken nearly three months and counting.

“We’re basically stuck here in Singapore until HM Passport Office says so,” he says.

“No way to come home. Our apartment tenancy in Singapore runs out this week, rendering us homeless as we had planned to live back in our home in London.”

Unable to find another short-term apartment to suit their needs, the family are planning on staying with a series of friends until they can fly home.

The Passport Office is currently advising travellers to allow 10 weeks for applications to be processed but, as Independent readers’ stories show, even this generous allowance isn’t always being met.

Meanwhile, Boris Johnson has claimed that applications are only taking four to six weeks.

“What I have in my head is that 91 per cent get their passport within four to six weeks,” the prime minister said during a Liaison Committee meeting on 6 July.

According to passportwaitingtime.co.uk, a site that crowdsources data to calculate the wait time for a UK passport, first adult passports are taking an average of 6.5 weeks; first child passports 6.3 weeks; adult renewals four weeks; and child renewals five weeks.

It follows the release of data from the Home Office last month revealing that more than 35,000 have been left waiting longer than 10 weeks to receive a new passport. The figures only cover the first three months of the year – January to the end of March 2022 – meaning many more UK travellers may have joined their ranks since then.

Britons are advised not to book travel abroad before they have a valid passport.

The Independent has approached HM Passport Office for comment.