Travel Documents (Hansard, 27 July 2000)

§ Ms Oona King

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department (1) if he will set a target time for dealing with all new travel document applications; [132895]

(2) what the average length of time taken to process a travel document application was in the last 12 months; [132897]

Number of working days lost due to assaults on police officers
	Assaults—days lost	Percentage of police working days lost to assault	Average police strength	Total working days assuming 228 per officer based on average strength
Avon and Somerset	416	0.06	3,012	686,736
Bedfordshire	211	0.09	1,041	237,407
Cambridgeshire	412	0.14	1,295	295,260
Cheshire	331	0.07	2,111	481,308
City of London	¹—	¹—	790	180,120
Cleveland	285	0.08	1,471	335,388
Cumbria	129	0.05	1,160	264,480

888W

(3) how many post-September 1999 travel document applications have still not been processed; and if he will set a date for clearing the backlog; [132894]

(4) if he will assign additional staff to the Travel Document Section as a temporary measure to help clear the backlog of applications; [132845]

(5) how many of the backlog of travel document applications left over from the period January to August 1999 have not been processed. [132896]

§ Mrs. Roche

The target for processing new travel document applications is six to eight weeks. This is already being met, on average, with applications submitted after September 1999. Applications submitted before this date, between January and August 1999, were taking in excess of nine months to process. However, there are now fewer than 300 of these applications left to process, all of which should be cleared over the next few weeks.

Since Autumn 1999 the number of staff in the Travel Document Section has increased from 20 to more than 90. These extra staff were needed to handle the increasing numbers of new applications and to process the older ones. There are approximately 5,000 new applications still awaiting consideration with staff currently processing those received in early June. The aim is to clear the bulk of these by the end of September.