Ms Fiona Penollar:

Whether in the representations or communication with people, very often they want reassurance. We have the tracker system, with which I am sure many members are familiar. Over 60% of our conversations with people are to the effect that they saw something on the tracker and they are asking whether it is true. It is important to give that reassurance. If we are aware of someone who is travelling on a date who is in any way affected by the delays, we ensure that those people are moved along. We look at between approximately 200 and 400 people a day with whom we are having such contacts. That is because we are in the peak of the peak at present. We have ridden the crest of the wave and are now coming down. If we were having this conversation in four weeks' time, it would be very different with regard to volumes etc. It is important that we take on board those lessons and that in future, we put measures in place to ensure that we can improve our communications constantly. Web chat has been a major development for us this year and has really changed how we are able to interact with people. In a web chat scenario, one operator can have conversations with six or seven people at a time, which is very different from phones and is a much better situation. As the Secretary General said, we have, in the past number of weeks, increased our resources there. We have moved from perhaps a relatively low base but have tripled our web chat in the last four weeks, and we continue to do that, because that is a lesson learned in respect of where we want to go.

With regard to moving from local to national media, a reason we have focused on local media is because it gives more intimacy. A challenge we have when communicating about passports, which I am sure members have come across many times, is that people only apply once every ten years. If they are in between that ten-year cycle, to be frank, the message does not really resonate with them because they are not in that position. That is the huge challenge. Perhaps when they go to the bedside locker and realise that the passport that they were convinced was in the safest place ever is not there, it is not immediately clear to them what that message was. The focus on local media is to bring it into that background noise so that they will recall it. We have found that has worked this year. We will only increase it and make it work better for us as we go forward.