Passport turnaround time?

[red30505]

Hi
more a rant than anything - but also hoping for good experiences...

We go away as a family first weekend of feb.
DD is 5 months and I've completely forgotton to get her passport yet.

Gov says it's a 5 week turnaround - going away 7 weeks time including christmas 2 weeks.

Does the passport office slow down over christmas?
Or is there a chance I'd get it in time?

I'm so annoyed that this is gonna cost me nearly £70 more plus a day in london if I can't get it on standard. I completely lost track of time!

Gah.

I thought it said to allow 10 weeks. Do it online as that's faster than doing a paper copy

Just done a renewal which took two weeks and arrived on Wednesday.

We've just done my husband's renewal and it took 6 and a half weeks.

Cool.
I did know it was 10 weeks ideally but completely slipped my mind
Guess I'm going for a fast urgent one.
In my head I had ages as it's next year.
Grr me.

We go away as a family first weekend of feb.

I wouldn't bank on it

Just renewed my DCs passports. Took less than 3 weeks from renewal online to receiving them in the post, in fact I got the new ones before they'd set the old ones back in the post!
New applications may be different but I was pleasantly surprised how quick they were as we are (were?!) due to travel in Feb.

I hope your rant is at yourself not the speed a government department over Xmas.

For what it's worth last year I sent my passport from Nz to Durham be renewed on 10th December. I had my new one in my hands on the 10th Jan. Allowing for 20 days of postage they did an incredible job.

Also there's a Twitter feed that uses crowd sourcing to work out passport waiting times and on online forum where you can discuss your situation www.passportwaitingtime.co.uk/

I just renewed mine - online - did it on 27 November then the next day posted my old one to them
Got my new one on 10 December

Now just need to find a country we will still be able to go to!

Rant is definitely at me for missing the date of 10 weeks.

Does anyone have any experience of what happened to in person appointments during the lockdowns?
did they go online?