Jennifer Whitmore (Wicklow, Social Democrats)
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430. To ask the Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade the number of extra staff that have been allocated for the passport office out of the 300 committed to in November 2021 to deal with the backlog of passport applications and anticipated increase in demand ahead of the summer months; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [4262/22]

Simon Coveney (Cork South Central, Fine Gael)
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Adequate staffing of the Passport Service to respond to demand is a priority for my Department and is an issue that is kept under constant review.

My Department is actively working with the Public Appointments Service on an ongoing basis to recruit and assign additional staff at all grades to meet the current and forecasted high demand for passports in 2022.

Additional permanent and temporary officers are continuously being assigned to the Passport Service at its sites in Dublin and Cork. As of 31 January, the number of staff was over 760. While this is slightly lower than the estimated number previously provided, as not all assignments which have been offered were accepted by applicants, significant numbers of staff will continue to be assigned to the Passport Service in the coming weeks and months with the goal of doubling staff numbers from June 2021 levels.

In addition, the Passport Service is engaged in intensive training of new and existing staff to ensure that they have the resources to process the volume of complex applications anticipated this year.

The additional staff that have been assigned and will continue to be recruited over the coming weeks will have a positive impact on processing times, particularly for first time passport applications.

Despite pandemic-related disruptions, the Passport Service issued over 634,000 passports in 2021. Passport Service figures show that 45% of adult online renewal applications are processed in one working day, while 99% of child online renewal applications are issued within fifteen working days.

When passport applicants do not provide all of the required documentation to the Passport Service, unfortunately, it can take much longer than the average processing time to process the application and issue a passport. There are currently 115,000 applications on hand with the Passport Service. Of these, 49,000 or 42% are incomplete applications. In these cases, the onus is on the applicants to submit required documentation to complete the application so that their passport can be issued. The experience of the Passport Service is that it can take weeks and sometimes months to receive the necessary documents after an applicant applies online.

I urge citizens to check the validity of their passports before booking travel and to ensure that they apply online in plenty of time. The processing of an online renewal application is consistently up to four times faster than the processing time of a paper application. It is important for applicants to follow up on their online application by submitting any required additional documents to the Passport Service in a timely manner.