Passport crisis blamed on Millennium bug

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Just another coincidence:

Passport crisis blamed on Millennium bug

Ray

-- Ray (ray@totacc.com), July 01, 1999

Answers

will somebody please translate the following into some kinda language I can understand?

*******"It is misleading to suggest that the delays experienced by the public are primarily caused by failures in IT systems. It is clear that the application demand has exceeded Home Office forecasts."**************

-- justme (finally@home.com), July 01, 1999.


Translation: If all those damn people would quit showing up and expecting services, we could cope with this $+=(*&^##/1 computer junk.

-- citizens can shove it (eatcake@home.twits), July 01, 1999.

Note that the Telegraph article says the biggest backlogs are at the two offices where the new [Y2K-ready] system has been in use. According to reports, the new system has been operatiional since LAST SEPTEMBER. Here are two BBC reports:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk_politics/newsid_382000/382598.stm

Thursday, July 1, 1999 Published at 18:32 GMT 19:32 UK

UK Politics

Post offices to ease passport backlog

The move may save many people's holidays

Post offices are to be drafted in to help ease the passports crisis.

The Home Office has announced that from next Wednesday all 1,500 main UK post offices will provide free two-year extensions to passports.

In addition, the embattled Passport Agency is setting up a national telephone centre on Friday to deal personally with inquiries from people travelling within a week.

About 500,000 people have already waited longer than the 10 working days passports are supposed to take and more than 90 people have failed to receive their documents before their travel dates.

The delays have been caused by a combination of new computer technology introduced last October at the same time as new rules requiring children and babies to have their own passports.

Home Secretary Jack Straw has admitted that the service will not be back to normal before September - and even that deadline would depend on a predicted big drop in passport applications happening "at some stage next month".

It has already been announced that an extra 100 staff will be recruited to help tackle the backlog, in addition to the 300 workers already hired, and staff are working into the night and at weekends to try to cut delays.

As queues built up again on Thursday, the owner of Harrods Mohammed al-Fayed, provided refreshments for people waiting outside the agency's central London headquarters.

Mr al-Fayed is currently in the process of appealing against the government's decision to grant him a British passport.

A Harrods spokesman said: "Mohammed sympathises, having had to wait five years for his passport."

Extensions to cover most people

The two-year extensions to passports will be issued for people whose travel documents are about to expire or which have expired in the past five years.

They will be issued subject to adequate proof of identity such as an old passport or driving licence.

They will be granted in many cases to include children on their parents' passports up to their 16th birthday.

Where the eldest child is 14 or more the passport (for all travellers on it) will be extended up to the eldest child's 16th birthday.

The call centre to field queries from applicants will open from 7am on Friday on 0845 600 46 46. It will operate seven days a week from 7am to 11pm.

The latest moves to alleviate the crisis came hours after Passport Agency staff were told they could not take part in the traditional Home Office annual sports day because of the overwhelming backlog in applications.

Staff had long planned to take the day off work for the event, which dates back to 1927.

However, Mr Straw insisted there was "no suggestion whatsoever" that the crisis was in any way the fault of the passport staff, who were working "round the clock".

'Rubbing salt in the wound'

Earlier Barry Reamsbottom, general secretary of the Public and Commercial Services Union, hit back at criticism from newspapers that civil service staff were partly to blame for the passport problems.

"It most certainly is not," he insisted. "This really is rubbing salt in the wounds. We're not talking about overpaid executives here.

"We're talking about fairly modestly paid clerical workers who've been working flat out, giving up their leave, coming in at weekends and evenings."

Although extra staff had been taken on to cope with the crisis, it took time to train them.

"The problem is a computer system that's failed to deliver what it promised, not civil servants' incompetence."

Mr Reamsbottom echoed Conservative criticism that the timing of new rules for passports had contributed to the crisis: "New rules on top of a system that's not delivering haven't helped."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/uk_politics/newsid_381000/381717.stm

Wednesday, June 30, 1999 Published at 17:27 GMT 18:27 UK

UK Politics

Passport crisis under control - Prescott

Tensions are rising as queues for passports grow

The government has moved to calm rising panic over what foreign press have dubbed The Great British Passport Scandal as some 440,000 people are still waiting for passports.

Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott told the House of Commons: "People should be assured that they will get their passports for holidays."

He said queues were getting shorter and insisted no one was in danger of losing their job over the issue.

"As the home secretary has made clear, they are working around the clock and at weekends to clear it," he said.

"I would have thought that achieving 99.9% is quite a record of clearing passports in time for people to go on holidays."

A bride who feared she would not get her passport in time for her honeymoon on Saturday has had a new one delivered to her by courier after Jack Straw said "heaven and earth" would be moved to help her.

Sharon Gowan, 31, of Clitheroe, Lancashire, will now be able to fly to Majorca with husband Paul Gowan, 35, to start their #2,500 cruise as planned.

"It is absolutely fantastic," she said. "We have cracked open a bottle of champagne."

Tension in queues

On Wednesday evening there was still a four-hour queue at the Glasgow passport office, with would-be holidaymakers besieging other offices across the country.

Bribes and queue-jumping were reported as news spread that the backlog would not be cleared until the end of the summer holidays.

Home Secretary Jack Straw said it would be September before the half a million or so outstanding applications were dealt with.

People waiting at the Petty France office in central London reported attempts to bribe those at the front of the queue to leave, queue-jumping, and fights breaking out.

Lara Grove, 22, from Northolt, west London, queued to obtain a new passport before a trip to Cyprus next Wednesday.

"People have been pushing in and getting aggressive and we haven't been able to do anything about it," she said.

Extra staff

About 100 staff are to be taken on in addition to the 300 already being recruited to deal with the backlog.

Some passports are being extended for two years instead of being renewed and the government is funding a #500,000 advertising campaign to inform people how to obtain their passports.

The agency is clearing almost 150,000 cases per week - 20% up on this time last year.

The delays have been caused by new computer technology introduced last October at the same time as new rules requiring children and babies to have their own passports.

The average waiting time for passports has risen from two weeks to seven, according to unions.



-- Old Git (anon@spamproblems.com), July 01, 1999.


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