THE Newport passport office is here to stay according to a UK Government minister.

Immigration minister Mark Harper spoke on a visit to the Newport passport office, which moved to its new location at Nexus House earlier this year from Olympia House on Upper Dock Street.

In 2011 the office was cut in half in size, with Newport ending the processing of postal and online applications.

But the minister reassured readers of the Argus that the office was not going anywhere.

He said: “It is here to stay. The whole point of moving into this, what I think a really good building, is we’ve got the business here now.

“Clearly it’s subject to the usual things of government. I’m not going to commit to an exact number of staff but the business is here.

“We’ve got things located here which deliver for on a national basis like the customer contact centre, which is a UK wide-service."

“This is a great building for people who work here,” he added, saying that staff raised issues with him like fake websites that claim they are processing passports when they don’t.

“What happens is somebody cons them, they pay their money to a website and only find out they’ve been conned when they turn up here or talk to one of our staff.

“Our staff then tend to bear the brunt of the person finding out they had been a victim of... a misleading website,” he said.

He added that “customer interaction” from overseas passport applications was also being dealt with at the Newport passport office.

In 2011 the UK Government decided to keep just 150 posts at the office which once staffed 300 people.

While Newport's Passport Office continued its operations as a customer service centre, it no longer processes postal and online applications.

The Argus had campaigned for the office and its staff to be kept in full.