Chris Law – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Home Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Chris Law on 2016-03-15.

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what proportion of interviews for a first-time adult passport application was conducted on a face-to-face basis in (a) England, (b) Northern Ireland, (c) Scotland and (d) Wales.

James Brokenshire

In 2015, Her Majesty’s Passport Office interviewed 222,264 adult customers applying for their first passport. Of these 218,742 (98.41%) were face-to-face interviews in person. The remainder were carried out using our Video Interview Service, typically used in the more remote parts of the country. The interview is undertaken by Her Majesty’s Passport Office staff over a video link, and the customer is accompanied at all times by one of our partner organisations.

This is broken down by country to:

England: 189,252 (99.99%) in person interviews

Northern Ireland: 3,965 (100%) in person interviews

Scotland: 15,496 (85.83%) in person interviews

Wales: 10,029 (91.24%) in person interviews