Working to make government more effective

Comment

Oops, she does it again

Theresa May takes over the struggling passport agency.

In April 2013, the Home Secretary announced that the troubled UK Borders Agency would be reabsorbed back into the Home Office. At the time we commented that this move alone did not address the underlying issues. Now, 18 months later, the UK Passport Office faces the same fate.

The tale of the UK Passport Office this summer is a sorry one: a backlog of passport applications. People – and MPs on their behalf – frustrated at threatened travel plans. An apparent combination of misforecasting demand and a failure to plan properly for the impact of the transfer of processing passports from overseas to UK processing – a change made at the time of peak rather than slack demand. Yet again, the Home Office has decided the solution – as with UKBA – lies with closer ministerial control. There are issues on which that might lead to benefits. For example, just as the UKBA appeared not to have informed ministers about the measures they were deploying to manage queues at the busiest airports, so UKPO appears to have failed to consult ministers on a decision to relax some security checks on overseas passports. A directly controlled service would be more likely to refer up such issues to ministers. Indeed the risk is that the new service would be micro-managed by ministers. It is far from clear what other issues a change of status solves. Executive agencies are already constitutionally part of their parent department – and ministers are fully accountable for them to Parliament. Changing the name tag on the door does not make it easier for ministers to see inside the operations of such a body. Indeed there is a risk that it does the reverse. One of the reasons for setting up executive agencies in the first place was that it enabled ministers to appoint people who had experience and were interested in managing big organisations – it upgraded operational delivery from being the ugly sister to policy’s Cinderella. It also enabled ministers and their officials to set clear performance targets and hold those managing the agency to account for them. The Passport Agency (with various renamings) was one of the early executive agencies – and indeed its very transactional focus suggests if it isn’t a candidate for executive agency status, nothing is. It had a rather chequered history – but after its problems with the introduction of a new IT system in 1999 had started to enjoy a reputation as an efficient service until the latest problems hit it. Some of the strains on the service were evident as early as 2011 when Kate Jenkins and Jen Gold produced their report on executive agencies, Unfinished Business. It is clear that the passport body needs refreshed management, the Home Office needs to monitor it better and the senior management need to be more alert to what solutions ministers will wear, and what they won’t. But all of those can, and should, be achieved within the executive agency model. We noted in Unfinished Business that too many departments had allowed their executive agencies to be subject to too little scrutiny and challenge. Executive agency status still looks right for the task of issuing passports. Other things need fixing. The danger is that changing status will substitute for and distract from the necessary changes rather than act as a spur for them.

Related content

19 JAN 2024 Podcast

Rishi v the Rebels

Peter Ricketts, the UK’s first national security adviser, joins the podcast team to discuss Sunak’s battles with his MPs.