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Passports

My honourable friend the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department (Joan Ryan) has made the following Written Ministerial Statement. Further to the Statement of 2 May 2006 by the honourable Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), then Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for the Home Office, announcing the proposed introduction of interviews for adult first-time passport customers, the House will wish to know that I am announcing today the opening of the first passport interview offices commencing in May with further offices to be added progressively throughout 2007. Passport interviews are part of the continuing fight against attempted passport fraud and forgery and are being introduced alongside other counter-fraud initiatives. These changes are critical because of increasing levels of attempted passport and identity fraud. It is widely recognised that the very nature of identity fraud makes it difficult to be precise when estimating the scale of the problem in terms of the number of fraudulent passport applications. The Identity and Passport Service has sought to address this issue through special exercises that scrutinise a representative sample of passport applications. During the period 31 October 2005 to 30 September 2006, a sample of several thousand applications was scrutinised by specialist Identity and Passport Service teams with support from fraud investigators. This found that 0.25 per cent of applications (equivalent to 16,500 fraudulent passport applications a year) were believed to be from people attempting to obtain a passport fraudulently. Almost half of these applications were stopped by existing Identity and Passport Service processes. The remainder had gone undetected. Our current estimate is therefore that the level of undetected fraud is about 0.15 per cent (equivalent to 10,000 applications against the planned 6.6 million passports issued per year). Although precise figures are difficult to obtain, it appears that the level of attempted fraud is increasing and getting more sophisticated. Analysis of the frauds shows that the main fraud threat is from first-time adult applications followed by first-time child applications. The Identity and Passport Service has developed a comprehensive counter-fraud strategy that will help to mitigate these patterns of fraud including: checking biographical information to ensure that the identity claimed on the application form is real, living, and can be linked to the customer through cross checks against a range of public and private sector databases; the development of facial recognition systems to check applicant images against a database of images of suspected fraudsters; checking applicants against increasingly sophisticated internal watch files including the database of passports reported lost or stolen; strengthening its business processes for identity authentication, and training and support for passport examiners and specialist fraud units; and interviews for all first-time adult customers. The requirement to attend an interview will be introduced gradually, starting with modest volumes of interviews in a limited number of interview offices, from May 2007, with the Identity and Passport Service progressively adding further offices through to the end of 2007. This progressive introduction will enable the Identity and Passport Service to enhance the interview process for customers using feedback from the early interviews. These measures are essential to protect our citizens from identity theft and to ensure that the British passport remains one of the most secure and respected in the world. I have placed an Introduction of Passport Application Interviews document in the Libraries of both Houses setting out the updated plans.