A father has accused the Passport Office of being a “shambles” and “not fit for purpose” after trying for nine months to renew his daughter’s passport.

Andy Holding started the process to renew her passport last July but nine months later is still waiting to receive one, forcing him to cancel a family trip away they had planned to celebrate his 50th birthday.

He told i: “It is an absolute shambles. The whole system is just not fit for purpose. The senior management within the Passport Office should be held to account as well as the government ministers.

“They knew this was coming, they can’t just blame this on Covid.”

HM Passport Office says demand for new passports is at an “all-time high” after more than five million people delayed their applications throughout 2020 and 2021 because of the pandemic.

The Centre for Economics and Business Research (Cebr) has suggested up to a million holidaymakers could miss out on holidays this summer as a result of passport processing delays, costing up to £1.1 billion in cancellations. The Home Office has rejected these figures as “unverified and nonsensical”.

Mr Holding, a heating engineer from Wantage, Oxfordshire, said an online application to renew his 15-year-old daughter’s passport was originally made in July 2021.

But the photos they submitted with the form were rejected twice by passport officers, despite being initially passed as acceptable online.

“Unfortunately, due to the time this had all taken the time period for the application had lapsed”, Mr Holding said.

The family had to make a second application online in February this year, racking up costs of £122 attempting to renew the passport.

Mr Holding, a father of three, said the last update they received on this application was 31 March when the tracking system said it was being processed.

“I have been trying to contact them for weeks and weeks now”, he said. “The call centre is absolutely useless.”

He even asked his local MP, David Johnston, to intervene, without success.

“I have paid for what should be a service and I have received nothing in return”, he said.

Mr Holding is not alone in struggling to organise a new passport. Wendy Payne told i she had to cancel a £3,568 holiday with her daughter, for which they had spent a year saving, due to passport issues.

Appeals for help to the passport office in Newport made no difference, she said. “So my daughter and I had to lose our holiday.”

Mr Holding said he felt the “whole operation should be privatised” to improve the service, a view shared by Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, who threatened to “privatise the arse off” public bodies such as the Passport Office if they did not clear backlogs of work.