Passport number anyone?

[Houseplantmad]

We put DS's application in a month ago and travel in 5 weeks time. They've today asked for his dual nationality passport to check the names match. I'm not sure if this is usual but I am worried that if he submits it he won't have any passport to travel on if his British one is delayed. It's his first adult one, which may be relevant.
Does anyone have a good phone number to speak to a human at the passport office please as the email they've sent just has the address for the passport to be sent to?

It might even be international law that a current passport cannot legally be taken out it's country of issue without the bearer being with it?

I remember being worried the time in the UK, when I applied for my childrens' first UK passports, and had to include their birth country passports, in case the UK authorities cancelled them... The lady I spoke to in the post office assured me that no country has the ability to cancel another country's passport.

Ugh. Just remembered that dd's Italian passport doesn't have her middle name as the Italians wouldn't allow it as it's not a saint's name or some such. Wonder if that's going to be an issue when we renew her British passport. She didn't yet have the Italian one when we last did the British one.
What?! That's ridiculous. Surely the passport has to match whatever is on the birth certificate?

rifling her Italian birth certificate does not have her middle name.....Her British and American birth certificates do. It's the Italians....what are you going to do? I'm certainly not going to argue with an Italian Civil Servant....if you've ever met one, you wouldn't either.

They don't have middle names in the country we live in, so my kids middle names only appear on their British passport. It would be a shame to lose them.

@sofiaames ah I see! I didn't even realise you could get birth certificates with different names. We only have Italian ones - which we didn't put middle names on as I thought it might cause problems!

I guess technically only the British one is a "birth certificate" because that's where the DC's were born. The American one is called "Consular Report of a Birth Abroad of a Citizen of the United States of America" and you need it along with your Uk birth Certificate to get any official documentation in the USA. I don't even know what the Italian one looks like....I just know that when I went to the consulate in London to notify AIRE about the birth of the DC's they yelled at me a lot for not notifying them that I lived there instead of Los Angeles and then yelled at me some more for my dd's middle name. (DS doesn't have one)