20 2GM Saturday April 30 2022 | the times
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money special
Our national airline is struggling to cope
and its customers are paying the price
Pages 62-high demand for this service at the
moment and the system is busy.”
The Teleperformance employee
questioned the official explanation. He
said: “I think the story of a massive
ramp-up of applications is a smoke
screen. The passports themselves are
going through fine at about five weeks.
The problems aren’t with the process-
ing but with the contact and reply when
problems arise with paperwork, miss-
ing photos, name spelt wrong, etc.”
The disclosures come after MPs
announced that a new ten-week target
to process applications is being
repeatedly breached. In response, Boris
Johnson threatened to “privatise the
arse” off the Passport Office. However,
most problems appear to be in areas
contracted out to private providers.
One former employee who left the
Passport Office this year, said: “Almost
all the delays [with processing] sit with
Sopra Steria which has been contracted
to receive, process and scan documents
sent in support of applications. That is
partially Covid-related — its staff do
have to be physically on site to handle
the documents— but also it’s just aclassic ‘lowest bidder winning the gov-
ernment contract then doing a bad job’
and government having no contractual
leverage to do a thing about it.” He
added: “Blame the civil service for con-
tracting out in the first place, but it’s a
private company messing this part up.”
The Passport Office said: “Our
extensive preparations have helped us
to handle more applications than ever
before, with more than one million
processed in March. The Home Office
has raised concerns with
Teleperformance about its delivery.
Teleperformance is urgently working
to add extra staff and significantly
improve current performance.”
BA says it is going on the biggest
recruitment drive in its history to help
deal with its problems after it shed
13,000 staff during the pandemic.
Teleperformance and Sopra Steria
did not offer a comment.Case study
P
eter French, 66, and his
wife Eileen, 67, from
Stratford in east London,
spent Christmas with
their daughter and
grandchildren in New York,
flying from Heathrow to JFK
airport on Christmas Eve (David
Byers and Andrew Ellson write).
On January 4, less than 24
hours before their departure
home, Eileen was told that she
had failed her pre-departure
Covid-19 PCR test and so could
not board her BA return flight.
Peter, a retired engineer, said:
“I spent more than five hours
trying and failing to get through
on the phone in about ten tries to
tell BA that I wanted to rebook
her return flight.”
Eventually he booked a new
flight with BA, which cost £342 to
travel on January 24, compared
with £231 for her original one.
“Regardless of... the rights and
wrongs of the situation, I believe
it’s my right, as a customer who
has paid a considerable amount,
to get some kind of response to
tell me what is going on,” he said.
Peter said the only response he
had was on Twitter, where a
tweet from the BA account told
him to contact his insurer
because it would pay out to him.
BA said it was in touch with
the couple to resolve their issues.
Ferda Sadik, of London, said
she had had a “very stressful”
time after her passport was lost
or stolen and the Passport Office
did not replace it in time for a
holiday to Turkey to visit family.
She completed her lost-or-
stolen application in
mid-February through the Post
Office check and send service,
but it did not arrive in time for
her trip in April. She said she had
regularly chased the service for
updates but got no reply.
She said: “For the last three
weeks, I called every day... but
the number was busy and not
accepting calls.
“I logged a form online
requesting callbacks as I was
getting so stressed, but I did not
receive any calls back.”
She said she had eventually got
through to someone days before
she was due to depart who said
her passport would be sent to
printing that day or the next and
TNT would pick it up for delivery.
“It did not happen,” she said.
“My seven-year-old daughter was
inconsolable. She hasn’t seen her
family in three years due to
Covid restrictions.
“The stress and inconvenience
caused is indescribable and I lost
£760 on the holiday.”Travellers are having to spend weeks
battling to get through to call centres at
British Airways and the Passport Office
in desperate attempts to save their
holidays. Customer service operations
at both organisations have become
overwhelmed, leaving thousands of
holidays under threat.
People longing for their passports are
having to wait two weeks for urgent
return calls from the Passport Office
while BA is only answering one in 20
calls after cancelling hundreds of
flights because of staff shortages.
An employee who works at
Teleperformance, the French company
that runs the Passport Office’s helpline,
said that “terrible management” and
chronic staff shortages had resulted in
“countless” Britons missing holidays.
Passport applicants chasing their
documents or needing help wait hours
to get through or repeatedly have their
calls cut off. Those that do get through
say that call centre staff are often un-
able to help so they are promised return
calls that take weeks to happen, if at all.
The employee, who asked not to be
named, said: “It’s a shambles.
Teleperformance is miss-
ing all service level
agreements and not
by days, by weeks.
The urgent callback
queues had a two-
week wait when I
last worked it. Lost
and stolen was
15,000 records
over its service
level agreement.
“Staff aren’t
trained, they are
thrown in and make
countless errors, and are con-
stantly being shifted from depart-
ment to department. It’s an absolute
mess and customers are suffering. I’ve
made countless people cry by telling
them they are not going to get their
passport on time.”
The Times has been bombarded with
complaints about BA, with travellers
struggling for weeks to get hold of
customer services after their flights
were unexpectedly cancelled. Others
say they have been unable to use
vouchers that were sent after flights
were cancelled during the pandemic or
have had difficulties rebooking hotels
through BA Holidays. This week BA
said that another 100 daily services
would be cancelled to “build more
resilience into our programme”.
When a reporter
called BA’s contact
centre 20 times this
week, on 19 occa-
sions a pre-recorded
message said “we are
sorry we can’t take
your call right now”
before the line cut out. On
the successful connection, the
hold time was 33 minutes.
One family needing to get hold of the
airline said they called 14 times and
spent 15 hours on hold but never
managed to speak to a human.
Passport applicants are facing similar
problems. This week, the Passport
Office’s Twitter page was besieged with
more than 100 tweets an hour directed
at its account. One user posted a
screenshot showing that he had made
55 call attempts but had not got
through.
Holidaymakers desperate for a Fast
Track appointment have also been let
down with the website either crashing
or not taking bookings. Repeated visits
to the service this week resulted in the
message: “Sorry, we’re experiencingSavers lose out while banks make most of higher rates
Phone chaos at Passport Office
and BA putting holidays at risk
Andrew Ellson, Ben Clatworthy,
David Byers, Katherine Denham
The biggest banks are cashing in on a
higher Bank of England base rate but
are not passing it on to savers.
Figures for the first three months of
the year show that banks such as
Barclays, HSBC, Lloyds and Santander
have enjoyed larger margins between
what they charge on loans and what
they pay to their savings account cus-
tomers.
The base rate, which has risen from
0.1 per cent in December to 0.75 per
cent, is good news for banks that earn
more on deposits with the Bank of Eng-
land. It leads to raised rates on mort-
gages and loans but customers should
also benefit from higher savings rates.
Barclays UK’s net interest income
rose from £1.28 billion in the first three
months of last year to £1.34 billion in the
same period this year. Lloyds’s figure
rose from £2.67 billion to £2.94 billion,
HSBC’s from £5.3 billion to £5.6 billion
and Santander UK’s from £925 million
to £1,05 billion.
Rishi Sunak, the chancellor, said this
week that the base rate could rise to
2.5 per cent in the next year.
Barclays, Halifax, Nationwide, Nat-
West and Santander have increased
their standard mortgage rates — which
borrowers revert to when a fixed-rate
deal ends — by the full 0.65 percentage
point base rate rise since December.
HSBC, which has raised its standard
variable rate by 0.25 percentage points,
is the only big name not to have passed
on the full rate rise to its customers.Mortgage rate rises affect about
1.07 million borrowers who pay their
bank’s standard rate. UK Finance, the
banking trade body, said borrowers
were paying 3.31 per cent on average at
the end of last year, making repayments
of about £980 a month on a £200,
loan. That average will have increased
as three base rate rises feed through.
Three quarters of mortgage borrow-
ers are on fixed rates and will be hit
when their deals end, because rates
have risen since September. The lowest
two-year fixed mortgage rate is now
double what it was in September, when
inflation began to rise. Five-year fixed
rates have nearly doubled.
Savings rates at these banks are lower
than the last time the base rate went up
to 0.75 per cent, in August 2018.Barclays still pays 0.01 per cent on its
standard easy-access account, having
not increased its rate since December.
The best easy-access account is 1.5 per
cent from JP Morgan’s smartphone
bank Chase, which would pay £
more interest on £10,000 of savings.
HSBC, Lloyds, NatWest and Santan-
der pay 0.1 per cent on their easy-access
accounts, having put them up from
0.01 per cent. Nationwide pays 0.11 per
cent, up from 0.01 per cent. All of them
are still paying less than they were the
last time the base rate was this high.
When the base rate rose from 0.5 per
cent to 0.75 per cent in August 2018,
Barclays increased rates to 0.25 per
cent, HSBC to 0.15 per cent, Lloyds to
0.2 per cent, Nationwide to 0.15 per
cent, NatWest to 0.2 per cent and San-tander to 0.35 per cent, according to
Savings Champion.
Although over the past ten years the
big banks have never paid the best rates,
savers in some cases are earning £
less a year on £10,000 of savings than
they were the last time the base rate
went up to its present level.
The best rate available from a major
high street provider, 0.8 per cent from
Nationwide Building Society on an
account that has a limit of three with-
drawals a year, is not even half the best
rate available on the market.
Anna Bowes, a co-founder of Savings
Champion, said: “If you leave your
savings with your bank, you are being
robbed. It’s as simple as that.”
Bank of England must not be afraid of
robust action, leading article, page 31George Nixon Money Reporter
Peter French spent over five hours trying to get through to BA after Eileen failed a pre-flight PCR testa shambles.
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