In thinking Passports are much more expensive than they need to be?

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If I am wrong then you can all educate me :)

We are going to Spain and Disneyland Paris next year so I need to organise passports. DS1 needs a new one, as do I, and DD needs her first one.

Its going to cost me £175.50

Do they really needs to be that expensive?

Doesn't a passport provide you with British Consulate assistance & protection, if the need arises while you're overseas? I think that's why they have to attach a cost to it.

When I got my UK passport renewed recently (here in Australia, but they send it to New Zealand to get "done"), it cost me $287 which is around ­170 quid, just for mine!

Also, a passport is "proof" of your citizenship. My DD2 is an Aussie citizen by birth but also a Brit by descent (as I'm a Brit)... but the only way to prove her Britishness is to have a British passport for her... cost a blinking fortune, having to get her an Aussie & a UK one when she was teeny LOL­

Absolutely extortionate price! We have 5DC. We were all invited to a friends wedding in June and needed first passports for all of us. Only 2 were below 16 years old, so 2 child passports and 5 adult passports!! Cant remember how much it cost, but I know it was an awful lot. - then the photos on top of that. 2 DC had photos rejected first time - one for DD4 being too pale, so second time round I was basically pinching her cheeks to get her a bit of colour in the photobooth, DD3 was rejected due to her mouth being slightly open and it was only after she had a second one done that we realised it was because of her orthodontic brace and there was no way she could close her mouth without looking as if she was pulling faces.
So 9 sets of photos at £4.50 each on top of that!!!

I have no problem with the price, it's not as if you need one every year. If you can afford to holiday abroad then you can afford the passports surely?

I just had to get 5 passports, 1 overseas UK and 4 Irish. Cost me over ?300.

This states that included in the £5.50 increase was "An increase of 50p ... to cover the cost of consular assistance services provided by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) abroad.". Implying that the majority of the cost of a passport goes to running the Passport service rather than the assistance services of the FCO.

And this is an interesting article about what some of the increases fund.

Well, when you´re abroad & have to have them done through the embassy & have to keep them up to date to live here, then 175GBP for three is bloody good value!

How would we find out how much they cost to produce? I have no idea.

If the passport holders don't cover the cost, then it would be paid for out of general taxation. Seems fairer to make the passport holders pay.

The leaflet which came with my DS's first passport said that the passport service does not receive any government funding - so the cost of the passport goes to pay for the running of the service.

I agree that it's expensive (£49 for DS's first passport) but we live in a country where costs (wages, rent, utilities etc) are high so I can see how the money goes.

When I need to get new passports I will be geting Irish ones, not much difference for the adult price, £70, but it is only £23 for child 3-17 years, and £14 for a three year one for children under 3, and when you get to the ripe old age of 65, your passports are then free!!! I can get these because my parents are Irish

Blame Labour, or, more specifically, Blunkett. Passports are a classic case of Labour waste to pander to the Daily Mail and the public sector unions.

The price of passports shot up when the ID card scheme was first mooted, because it was one of the main sources of funding for the National Identity Register. A ten year passport was £18 in 1997, and is now closer to £80. This has funded ID Cards (now scrapped, but upon which around £250m has been spent), NIR (now scrapped), Phase Two biometrics (now scrapped), the interviews for first-time adult passport holders (which have caught a fantastically cost-effective eight miscreants, at a cost approaching one million pounds per arrest).

So passports have quadrupled in price in order to fund three disasters and a waste of money. The passport office has, in the meantime, nearly doubled its headcount. David Blunkett - a man who believes that no-one with anything to hide has anything to fear, except when its his enthusiasm for other people's wives, at which point he gets very coy indeed - gave you this lot, and Brown kept on funding it by raising the price of passports. ID Cards are another example of Labour's ability to spend taxpayers' money like it was water, with nothing to show for it afterwards.

I hung on without a passport for the last year - old one expired and I wasn't paying out for one in my maiden name knowing we had the wedding booked for the start of this year.

THAT does annoy me - that they'll only add a few months of a passport on if you want to namechange when you marry - it seems very anti-woman really.

"THAT does annoy me - that they'll only add a few months of a passport on if you want to namechange when you marry - it seems very anti-woman really."

No country will issue passports (or, more generally, credentials) with substantially more than ten years on them, and even if they did, few countries would accept a passport that was more than ten years old. The obvious objection is photographs, but there are a whole stack of other problems about how long it takes to cycle old designs out, how resistant things are to forgery over a long term, willingness of visa authorities to issue "life of passport" visas, etc, etc.

For example, the current UK passport is substantially more forgery resistant than those of ten years ago (when the photograph was still laminated in) and yet more so than the UK passport of twenty years ago (when the photograph was simply stuck and over-stamped, and the details were handwritten). If you were allowed to, say, get a passport, change your name the following year, and have credit for the remainder, you'd have a 19 year old passport at the end, which in turn means a forger today need only attack the target of a 1991 passport.

"THAT does annoy me - that they'll only add a few months of a passport on if you want to namechange when you marry - it seems very anti-woman really."

Not true -- I've just had mine changed to my married name, and they've given me a new passport with 10 years plus 6 months on it.

They'll only add a few months on - which is annoying as heck when yours runs out the year before your wedding. I don't begrudge paying the best part of £100 every 10 years - I do begrudge paying it twice in 2 years!

"I've just had mine changed to my married name, and they've given me a new passport with 10 years plus 6 months on it."

Precisely. But had you had nine years left on your existing passport, they would still only have given you 10.6: they wouldn't give you 19 years.

"Can a 17 yo get a childs? "

No.

It's just part of the cost of travel, IMO.

We're a dual national family, excepting DH, so we need to keep 9 passports among us.

Just have to budget carefully.

"It's just part of the cost of travel, IMO."

That's no reason to quadruple the cost in just over ten years, though.

Why not lobby the PM or your MP to get the cost down then, tokyo, now that Labour is no longer in office?

Otherwise, well, it's a cost of travel because you can't leave the country without one.

So it's buy one or stay put.

We payed out loads of money for them, as we needed three childrens' one and DH needed to renew his adult one last year.

So we paid up.

Or we could have stayed home.

its a lot to pay out in one go £80ish, esp if whole family need them all replaced, but
over all works out £8 a year so not bad

shame they dont do a yearly direct debit or even monthly, where is £1 a month (obv will be more for interest charges lol)

yes annoying over renewing when i got married, i had 6years to run on mine,but obv didnt give me 16yrs

In theory you don't need 9 passports, Expat, you could get Right To Abode stickers in your children's USA passports. Not quite as expensive as UK Child passports I believe, and one less document per child to keep track of.