Around 3,000 blank British passports due to be sent to embassies around the world have been stolen from a van that was hijacked near Manchester, in what the Government admits was a major security breach.

The Foreign Office admitted that 24 parcels containing blank passports and vignettes - the stickers used for visa stamps - were taken from a vehicle that was travelling from the printers in Oldham to RAF Northolt yesterday.

Security experts have suggested that the cargo, which has a street value of up to £5 million, was probably targeted deliberately.

The van was hijacked when one of two delivery men got out at a newsagent to buy chocolate and a newspaper. While he was gone, a colleague in the vehicle was threatened and assaulted before the van was driven, with the second delivery man still inside, to a quiet street nearby.

The packages of secure documents were then taken from the van.

A Foreign Office spokeswoman admitted it was a serious breach of security and that the Home Office and Identity and Passport Service (IPS) had taken “preventative action” to guard against the stolen passports being forged and used to commit fraud.

The passports involved were the new electronic variety, which contain a chip replicating the data printed on the document itself.

An IPS spokesman said: “Our hi-tech security features mean that these passports are unusable.”

Security industry specialists, however, suggest that the documents could be forged and used to commit crime even though the information on the chip would not match the rest of the forged document.

Tom Craig, a former Scotland Yard fraud officer who now runs ID security company Amarlis, said they can be worth up to £1,700 each.

“That is because they can be used by putting in biographical information of your own, not necessarily getting the chip information right, and then you can use them to open up bank accounts or actually get employment,” he told the BBC.

Industry specialist Steve Beecroft agreed that the passports could not be used to move between countries but forgers could print the passports for use as proof of identity for banks in the UK.

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