Renewing passports

[TheChosenTwo]

I need to renew 2 of my dcs passports. Sil did her 2 recently and said she didn’t need a counter signature, is this no longer a thing then? I’m going to the post office where they do the application for you, take the photos and send off the old one. She did hers online. Haven’t really looked into it to be honest so could google and find out for myself but just curious to know if anyone else has done this recently and not needed it countersigned?

It can take up to a week for them to register as received at the Passport Office, even though you know they've received them

To be fair, once they're into the system at their end, things can/will move quickly as they're actually on someone's desk unless it's the Belfast office which had dh's passport renewal last year

...ds' passport renewal, done at the same time, and was his first adult passport, only took about 2 weeks at the height of the delays last summer (dh's took about 12 weeks)

Mine and DS's renewals arrived today. The whole thing took just over 3 weeks. The longest bit was acknowledging receipt of the old passports which took about 10 days from sending them. I think I read somewhere on their website that this bit needs doing manually by staff, so possibly with them striking it's taking a bit longer. The rest of it seems to be a more electronic process.
Strangely the 2 new passports were sent back by different delivery companies. DS's arrived by TNT at about 3pm and mine by DHL at 6pm. I'm not sure how cost effective it is for them to use different delivery companies?
But all in all a decent process & only slightly longer, given that I was expecting a much longer process with the strikes, than my other DS who had his renewal in 10 days in February.

Just coming back to update - one passport has been approved (the one for the youngest) and the other needs identity confirmation. I don’t understand this,
with the youngest’s application it wouldn’t allow me to apply without supplying them details of someone to verify their identity but I was allowed to process the older ones. She doesn’t look very different from her old passport either!
Oh well, just another thing to sort out I suppose! Bloody passports 😂

Passport renewal came back yesterday. Just under 2 weeks from the old one being received.