Mr. Niall Burgess:

There are a series of questions there. Ms Penollar will speak about the cost per passport. We have the printer capacity and the machinery that we need. We have three passport printing machines that are capable of printing more passports per year than we actually process currently. The blockage in the system is the delay with the checks required for first-time applications and lost passports. These are far more complicated and they take more time. On the website we state 33 days, which is the actual turnaround time, but it has been coming down progressively.

On resourcing, we issue the greater part of our passports in the first half of the year. Over the last couple of years we have seen the surge coming a little earlier each year than it had the previous year. We take on temporary staff in order to manage this. We recruit and train these staff and we try to have them in place early. We had a particular difficulty this year, which lies at the heart of the delays in processing at the moment. Although we had intended to have temporary staff in place by 1 January, the vetting process for those staff took longer than it had in previous years.