Brits hit by holiday hell as thousands of passports lost in post

SUN-starved Brits have been hit by fresh holiday hell as thousands of passports are lost in the post.

Holidaymakers have had to halt their travel plans due to their missing documents, which is now affecting upcoming Easter breaks too.

Thousands have gone missing over the last year amid the disastrous delivery service.

Scary stats show the number of misplaced passports has DOUBLED in just 12 months.

The Passport Office has pinned the blame on delivery firm TNT, who bagged an exclusive multi-million-pound contract to distribute the documents.

But despite the megabucks deal, a whopping 1,200 passports or supporting documents were lost in the first six months of last year.

Excuses for the missing mail range from application form mistakes, people moving address or errors by Passport Office and TNT staff.

Some exasperated Brits have even had their passports delivered to the wrong house.

It has left thousands of travellers out of pocket after being forced to cancel their holiday plans last minute.

Desperate punters have even told how they drove from depot to depot to try and find their documents after booking flights abroad.

Travel consultant Paul Charles said: "Many people have had to cancel their travel plans and as a result have lost out on hundreds or even thousands of pounds."

TNT, owned by FedEx, was awarded a three-year contract worth £77million to deliver new and renewed passports in 2019.

A HM Passport Office spokesman said: "Between Jan 1 and July 31 HM Passport Office sent over 3.3million items to its customers.

"Less than 0.04% of those were reported as having been lost during delivery.

"The safety of our customers’ personal data is of paramount importance and every attempt is made to recover lost or mis-delivered documents.

"Once reported, passports are cancelled on the system immediately in order to mitigate against the risk of misuse and we continue to work with our delivery partner to develop measures to reduce the number of losses overall."

Now fed up sun-seekers have started a petition calling for a probe into TNT's repeated failures, after the firm made a series of blunders.

It urges the Government to look into the deal and ask why the firm's apparent incompetencies have not been looked into.

It comes after the company also spoiled Christmas breaks by delays in passport deliveries, which they said was due to high demand.

Applicants were warned they may face waits of up to 10 weeks for their new passports to be processed, even if they forked out for the Fast Track service.

A TNT spokesman said at the time the backlog had been caused as a result of a surge in applications due to lockdown restrictions easing.