I join the hon. Member in paying tribute to the staff at the Belfast passport office, who are working hard and delivering a strong service. I am pleased to hear about the engagement that he and his colleagues have had, which reflects some of the comments of other Northern Ireland Members about support in a previous exchange on passports. There is incentivised overtime, but obviously there has to be a balance in terms of wider pay policies. As I touched on, we need to ensure that people are working sensible amounts of overtime, because working seven days a week for months on end is not healthy or appropriate.
We are certainly looking at the future and what the capacity is in particular locations. We looked to see how we could maximise that, particularly as social distancing regulations ended. We dealt with something like 60,000 people at the counters in March and 74,000 last month. Although that is not the majority of our applications, it is certainly a service that we have looked to expand, as I will come on to in a moment.