Why waiting time was longer than usual

I REFER to your reader Miss Ida Fong's letter headlined, ''Poor service'' (South China Morning Post, February 23).

We have looked into Miss Fong's complaint about the long waiting time when she attended the East Kowloon Office for passport collection on February 16 which was a school holiday following the Chinese New Year.

Normally, the average waiting time for passport collection will not exceed 30 minutes. However, on that particular day, there was an exceptionally large number of applicants calling at the office for passport collection (about 460 as against the daily average of about 250-300). As an emergency measure, a temporary notice was put up at counter No 17 advising the public that the waiting time for passport collection would be around two hours. I am sorry that Miss Fong had not been able to see this poster which was put up at about 10.30 am. We have reminded our staff that on such occasions, verbal announcements should also be made to keep the public informed at the same time.

We are aware that it is unacceptable for anybody to wait for such a long time to collect a passport. This happens only on certain busy days such as pre-holiday seasons or during school holidays when members of the public choose to attend our office for services even if it is not the scheduled date for them to collect their passports.

I wish to emphasise that it is our established practice to maintain a high standard of service to the public by flexibly redeploying our given resources within the department. However, during school holidays when all public-orientated offices are equallybusy, there is always a limit to what we can do in the aspect of staff redeployment. We hope the overall situation will improve by early April when additional resources will be provided to handle BN(O) passport matters and our offices will have more staff for issuing new passports. For the public's convenience, we shall also make more permanent notices to advise the public if the average waiting time for passport collection exceeds the standard waiting time of 30 minutes.

LANDIS TSE for Director of Immigration