Urgent warning as holidaymakers face anxious wait to renew passports for summer

PASSPORT office workers have gone on strike – leaving Scots who are renewing their travel document for upcoming trips abroad to face tense waits.

Staff are undertaking a five-weeks of industrial action amid an ongoing civil service standoff over jobs, pay, pensions and work conditions.

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More than 1,000 members of the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS) at eight sites across the UK are walking out in an escalation of the long-running dispute.

Picket lines will be formed today outside offices in Glasgow, Durham, Liverpool, Southport, Peterborough, London, Belfast and Newport, Wales.

The union said those taking action will be supported by a strike fund.

PCS general secretary Mark Serwotka has written to the UK Government calling for urgent talks in a bid to resolve the differences.

He has also accused ministers of treating its own employees differently to others in the public sector after talks were held with unions representing health workers and teachers.

The union is stepping up strikes, with a nationwide walkout of more than 130,000 civil servants planned for April 28.

The Home Office said the Passport Office has already processed more than 2.7 million applications this year, adding over 99.7 per cent of standard applications are being processed within 10 weeks, with the majority of those delivered to customers well under this timescale.

It is not yet clear if applicants will be hit by delays due to the strike action but many travelling overseas in the near future will face anxious waits.

Last week queues formed outside the Glasgow passport office as people scrambled to get their documents renewed ahead of the industrial action.

There are currently no plans to change official guidance which states that it takes up to 10 weeks to get a passport.

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