Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

Ed Miliband told the Commons on Wednesday that the problem had been caused by cuts and a failure by May to keep watch as she was bickering with the education secretary, Michael Gove. "Tens of thousands of people are finding their holidays are being cancelled because they are not actually getting a passport," he said.

Why would tens of thousands of people find their holidays were being cancelled when the problem is supposedly only affecting around 30,000 people who are applying from abroad?

Really, that Ed Millibland is every bit as thick as Fishfinger and the other commies on this thread.

Oh, and fwiw, my husband and I have both renewed our passports recently and we were initially quite concerned as we only have a narrow window of being in the UK between early April and mid June, and we needed them back promptly. The service was fantastic. We both got a text from the Passport Office after about 3 days to acknowledge receipt. The payments were processed after about a week. We got another text after a fortnight to say the passports were being dispatched. And the passports were delivered by courier a couple of days thereafter.

Problem? Maybe in some Labour activists' heads. But otherwise - NO!

this passport backlog is certainly a pretty poor show (old chap!), but scarcely of even nationwide importance

i wonder how many passports are delayed because the applicant was cutting things pretty fine anyway in what is obviously a period of very high demand - e.g. how many applications made within say 8 weeks of the required usage

i'm certainly delighted that checks are not being slackened, for that really could have serious implications

The passport fiasco is just a sideshow, what bad news are they hiding?

It's not as if you need a passport to get into the UK anyway, ask any illegal.

Boris and his water pistol!

Passports.

What crisis?

These are the con party's efficiency cuts.

I wonder how many more cons have passed through the borders?

rubbish fred ..... passport office has apparently lost just 600 staff over the last 4 years
this is just a "silly season" story from which not a great deal of political capital can even be manufactured

All!!!!!!!!! if this isnt a Passport Crisis why are the Right Wing Press and Media reporting it as so. ?????????

Every front page and every news headlines.

Lets stop talking silly Tories.

Did you not see the rest room full of thousands of passport files on the evening news last night.

of course it does .... it's the silly season and it's fun copy for the papers

Passports have always been a problem. There used to be passport crises every year. You had to allow at least 6 weeks. One of the causes is that expats cannot get their passports locally in their own countries now because of the chip system. They have to apply to UK. It is a temporary fuss. It is just a lack of other stories that makes the papers interested.

6 weeks Hays, 6 weeks is nothing at the moment.

You need to catch up.

Its due to government austerity cuts that werent necessary.

stop rattling sticky and go out and enjoy the sunshine :-)

Food bank charity told to stop criticising benefit system or face shut-down – by the government 12/06/2014.....



What would you do in that situation?

It seems that food bank charity The Trussell Trust has been making too many waves around the Conservative-led Coalition government’s policies regarding benefits, social security and welfare.

Readers may recall how the charity warned that Coalition policies had created a need for a huge expansion in the number of food banks across the UK. The Tories countered this by accusing the trust of “misleading and emotionally manipulative publicity-seeking”, and also of “aggressively marketing [its] services”.

After this failed to make a dent in public opinion, the Daily Mail tried to discredit the trust by claiming it was handing out food parcels without checking whether the people claiming them were bona fide.

But it turned out that the paper’s claim of “inadequate checks on who claims the vouchers, after a reporter obtained three days’ worth of food simply by telling staff at a Citizens Advice Bureau – without any proof – that he was unemployed” was not true. The reporter in fact committed fraud by telling a string of lies in order to falsely claim his food parcel in a flagrant abuse of the system.

The public response was immediate – donations to the Trussell Trust’s fundraising appeal shot through the roof.

Now the government has tried a different tack: blackmail. Instead of trying to justify the government’s position or undermine that taken by the trust in public, it has been revealed that “someone in power” told trust bosses that the government “might try to shut you down” if the trust continued to cause it embarrassment.

The Trussell Trust is in a fairly robust position with regard to government interference; a 2005 decision by the charity’s trustees to avoid seeking government funding means it is in a better position to resist pressure.

But the trust has to consider the worst-case scenario. If the government did manage to shut it down, hundreds of thousands of people would starve.

That is the real threat posed by the Conservative-led government. Shutting down the Trussell Trust won’t hurt anybody who runs the charity or volunteers for it.

But it could kill food bank users across the country.

It is exactly the kind of covert, backstabbing move we have come to expect from the likes of Iain Duncan Smith.

Oh, come on! You knew RTU (it means Returned To Unit and is our tribute to his Army career) would figure in this article somewhere.

According to Trussell chair Chris Mould, he received a phone call from “someone” in the office of the Secretary-in-a-State about Work and Pensions, back in 2011. He said it was “basically to tell me that the boss was very angry with us because we were publicising the concerns we have over the rising number of people who were struggling as a consequence of delays and inefficiences in the benefits system”.

Unfortunately – for sly abusers like Duncan Smith – the kind of threats recorded above are really only useful when they are kept secret. The idea is always to present the victim with a double-bind – in this case, not only would food bank users suffer, but the Trussell Trust would get the blame for having withdrawn the service (whether voluntarily or not).

Now that we all know the government itself is putting the screws on – and is doing so in retaliation against the Trussell Trust’s entirely legitimate attempts to raise awareness of government policies’ disastrous effects – it would be electoral suicide.

That being said, watch Iain Duncan Smith on Question Time today.

He’s probably stupid enough to go through with it anyway.

I can't say I care if it is sixth months. I have a full set of passports. It is a storm in a teacup. Let them have a holiday in the UK.

You stop trying to bury bad news Manuel.

HEY.....SMWH going very well again today.

The Trussel trust have just generated demand.

well done sticks .... i've actually been reducing exposure for i still think a big sneeze from wall street is on the cards, or at least i quite hope so :-)

Not too sure about that Cyners although IRAQ could make things difficult.

Yanks now seem to be rather upbeat compared to 6 weeks back.

Hays stop talkin -hite thats been proved to be totaly wrong even 'get on yer bike' Tebbit as admitted it and apologised.