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

[ShadeofViolet]

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?

'In theory you don't need 9 passports, Expat, you could get Right To Abode stickers in your children's USA passports.'

They are born in the UK to a UK national father and mother. They are British. DD1 was nearly 7 before she even left the country at all.

Oh, and people who stay on IRL or any other type of visa and do not naturalise, well, now, the British government is charging £150 to put a new visa into their new passport as they renew them.

So cheaper to be the Brits they are.

A friend of mine whose husband is German (she's a Geordie) did just get German passports for their children as they were cheaper.

I don't have a problem with the price of the passports, either.

It's the cost of travel.

Hey ho.

I have no problem with the cost of an adult passport but the children's ones are extortionate, especially given they have to be renewed every 5 years.

We can't really afford 2 new adult passports and 2 children's ones.

So we are not holidaying abroad, and won't be for the forseeable I should think.

I don't see a foreign holiday as a right - it's something that you save and budget for if you want it enough and can afford it.

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

It was easier under the Labour government, as my then MP was a member of the Labour awkward squad who voted against ID cards and with whom I did a lot of business. My new MP, thanks to a boundary change, is a complacent Labour aparatchik who hasn't yet answered my letters.

I am the same as the poster who made the point about the length of time a child's passport is valid. Five years, yet still cost the same as an adults. I naively thought that when DD's passport needed to be renewed I would simply waltz into the embassy in Bangkok and they would replace the photograph free of charge. Not a chance, it cost me the same as an adults, very annoying.

Actually, that would be a good change: you should be able to simply update your child's photo after the first 5 years for a nominal fee. Replacing the whole thing is a money making scheme.

"Actually, that would be a good change: you should be able to simply update your child's photo after the first 5 years for a nominal fee. Replacing the whole thing is a money making scheme."

It's a security improvement, not a money-making scheme. The photograph is now an integral part of the document: like your signature, it's printed directly into the material of the information page. For any post-2005 passport it's also encoded into the chip in the rear cover. That's a really good thing: the older passports, in which a separate photograph was bonded to the page, were open to abuse, because any mechanism which allowed the photograph to be altered by the good guys also allowed it to be altered by the bad guys. The old assumption, that laminating machines and rubber stamps were dark technological secrets that only state actors were party to, is long gone. I don't think that you've been able to have passports changed since the introduction of the red ones, but each move to make the information more deeply inscribed into the body of the paper has been a step forward.

So it's not possible to modify the names or photographs on current passports, for good reason. You might argue children's passports should be subsidised, but if you accept the basic contention that a passport costs £X, then issuing a new one for any reason costs £X.

In Germany a passport costs about 50 euros. And they have embassies abroad etc etc - all the benefits that Brits enjoy.

British passports are absolutely extortionate.

"In Germany a passport costs about 50 euros."

Exactly. Because they didn't have a semi-fascist Home Secretary who thought that the South African system of internal passports was a good thing. The ID card scheme, which drove the costs of passports through the roof, was New Labour to its core, and when the history of it comes to be written will be seen as the disaster it really was.

I went to a few government events about it, and they were utterly shambolic: while Simon Hughes and Peter Lilley were providing cogent reasons as to why it was simply a large hole to pour money down, Labour put up some addled old duffer from the House of Lords whose argument boiled down to "I had an ID card when I was in the ATS in the war, so it's a good thing to spend a few billion of your money on", completely ignoring the fact that no-one working in the field was actually worrying about the ID cards per se, (they're just non-driving driving licenses, after all), but about the national identity register, which was clearly both an impossible and a pointless project.

But the legacy of the NIR is in a bloated and over-staffed passport service, a desperate attempt to find a role for the network of enrolment offices that were being built (hence the interviews for first-time adult passport holders) and the nonsense of ICAO Phase 2 biometric passports, which were really a stalking horse for holding fingerprints and/or iris scans on the NIR.

Right To Abode stickers also mean you have to queue needlessly in the interminably long non-citizens line. Anyone who's had to do this regularly (esp with DC) will happily pay for the extra passport.

Well, Germany also has ID cards. I see them as a good thing. My DH can travel anywhere in the EU with his - no passport necessary. They are acceptable as ID everywhere you might need it within Germany. They are also small and relatively cheap. Shame the UK didn't go through with them.

I also have a problem with children's passports. My DD has an ID card which is valid for 6 years. 6 years! The photo on it is from when she was 3 months old. She's 7 months now and already looks totally different. How is that supposed to be secure in any way?

Its ridiculous just renewed my partners for £85 to have it fast tracked

Now i need to fork out for my ds's first one and to get my renewed

ID cards, as a low-cost alternative to passports for non-visa travel, have much to recommend them, and the German scheme works well. It's about as secure as a driving license.

Unfortunately, what Blunkett proposed wasn't that: it was an all-singing, all-dancing "gold standard" of identification which would do for everything, in isolation. Most people don't need that, if indeed it is possible, and the enrolment problem (how do you initially issue such tokens?) is almost insurmountable. Even in companies bidding for the business, the salesmen were about the only people who believed it was possible, and when my then employer wasn't selected everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

And, given the police's propensity for arresting people for taking photographs, anyone who believes it wouldn't have become compulsory carry is currently talking to the fairies at the bottom of their garden.

"So it's not possible to modify the names or photographs on current passports, for good reason. "

no, but there is no good reason why the photo can not be added as an integral part of another page and the old page made invalid. This should be allowed once to make the child passport valid for 10 years from first issue (ie not just valid for another full 5 years IYSW
IM) The back cover could have space for two chips - the original a 5 year replacement.

Any system which is usable by the good guys can be abused by the bad, whatever it is.

"but there is no good reason why the photo can not be added as an integral part of another page and the old page made invalid"

Not as easy as it sounds. The lamination on the photograph page passes through the binding, and there's a substantial edge onto the inside front page. The photograph page, which (now I come to look at a post-2005 passport) has the chip on the back, is manufactured and then bound into the passport, not vice versa. It's not at all clear how you could either modify an existing page or add another page without dismantling the passport.

If there were public clamour for passports for children to be cheaper, the solution is to make them cheaper, not to reduce their integrity.

coalition govt babe! nothing will be free anymore, or cheap. nothing

'Right To Abode stickers also mean you have to queue needlessly in the interminably long non-citizens line. Anyone who's had to do this regularly (esp with DC) will happily pay for the extra passport.'

And according to the UKBA fees website, they're now £120 for children.

V. £49 for a British passport for a, well, British person.

Again, there's a fee to have them changed into new passports as well.

"coalition govt babe! nothing will be free anymore, or cheap. nothing"

Well, I'm sure the idiots people that voted Lib Dem to "keep the Tories" out are enjoying their 12 months in government, before the utter annihilation of their party over the coming five years.

I just had mine renewed, paid extra for the 4 hour service as I am only in UK for a couple of weeks.

Comparing Germany and UK is difficult as most people have just a ID card, which costs ?28.80. This is compulsory. A Reisepass which costs ?59, is only necessary for trips outwith Europe.

We cannot do without passports as we live abroad. Saying that, I have not yet renewed DS's UK passport yet, he is travelling on his German Kinderausweis.

I suspect that the days of the Kinderausweis are numbered. It is ridiculously easy to forge, and does not even have a photo on it.

agree its extortionate. Especially bad for name changes. Its one thing to have to pay £85 for something that lasts 10 years... i got it 6months before it expired as I was going to the US. I then got married 2 years later, and discovered that I was going to have to pay the same cost to get passport in married name and 'lose' about 8 years worth of passport.

Driving licence I got changed name for free. There is no justification for extortionate charges just to change from maiden to married name.

Not that I can afford a holiday now, but last time I went abroad I used my maiden name passport and keep a maiden name credit card still 'just in case'

Similarly charging ridiculous amounts for baby passports seems stupid....

"Similarly charging ridiculous amounts for baby passports seems stupid...."

Blame messy cross-border divorces for the end of the "plus X children" thing on passports.

Agree. Rising from £18 to £80 during the last Govt is really taking the p*!

When I last renewed a couple of years ago the fee wasn't even printed on the form. Obviously because of the constant rises. Had to go online to find out the current cost