Children's passports - Rip off?

[onepairofhands]

Hi

As children's passports are only for 5 years and then you have to pay the full fee again to get another 5 years, this means that children have to pay (at current fees) £100 for 10 years passport use compared to £77 for an adult. It seems very unfair to me that it costs £21 more to be a child with a passport than an adult and pretty expensive for families. Also as an adult you often use your passport for other stuff like opening a bank account, new job etc whereas children only need their passport to travel. With 2 children and a plan to go abroad every other year/third year, it is going to cost us over £60 each time just for the children to leave the country! Wrote to IPS who told me 'children's passports were good value for me'! Anyone else think this is a rip-off? (so much for help for hard working families) and what can we do about it?

Adults passports are so much easier though. Most will be renewals so as long as the photo looks about the same as the last one, all that needs to be done is a re-issue.

Children's ones will need whoever countersigned the new picture checked (as they will inevitably look very different after 5 years) before the passport can be re-issued. Plus they'll need 2 physical passports (with embedded chips, new numbers etc) for every 1 an adult has. I'm quite surprised they don't charge us £77 a throw for the kids ones too!

BTW, I had to buy 2 first passports for my children last month, plus a renewal for me so I'm still smarting from the expense too...

Yes it is a rip off. Have just had to renew dds and dh and will have to get a new one once dc3 is born. Sometimes you even need them to fly within the UK which is even more of a pain.

Well passports in some other countries are much more expensive than our here and we can travel anywhere in the world. My children are half Turkish and if they were to get a Turkish passport they would be paying more than £100 each and for that they would only be able to travel to a few countries without paying an extortionate visa fee on top. Needless to asy I have never bothered getting them a Turkish passport.

Personally I don't think Britsih passports are that expensive. What can you do about it? Not much really, you either pay and go abroad or don't pay and you don't go.

WEll, I've just spent over £200 renewing passports, so I'm smarting a bit too! having said that I suppose it is an official document, and only a necessity if you choose to go abroad (although as we only seem to go abroad every 3 years or so, it rankles a bit!- by the time we go again, the kids passports will probably all need renewed again, so all that money for 1 trip, then to lie in a drawer...) See, now you've made me cross about it!

But it's not just if you go abroad. You sometimes need to use them for internal flights too. Some airlines will not accept any other form of ID for flights even within the UK.

I don't think they are a rip-off tbh. Not when you consider that a lot of countries who might have charged you for a visa entry won't simply by virtue of you carrying a British passport.

What is a rip-off is when you do them abroad, and not only have to pay more, but also if you need to telephone the Consulate dealing with them, you also have to give your credit card details and pay for the (premium rate) phone call twice, once with your phone company billing and once with your credit card.

Interesting replies. I just think it seems unfair that it costs more for children to have a passport than an adult. To add insult to injury, when I got passport for nr 1 in 2005 they told me that after 5 years you simply send in a new picture and get another 5 years to make the full 10 years. Now I learn IPS have 'disbanded this system' in 2008 which neatly coincides with when Siemens got a massive contract to run IPS. I have a feeling this is another case of the private companies (usually non UK ones) coming in, blinding the Govt with the amazing things their IT systems can do, getting a huge contract and then fleecing the public or making a hash of it or massively overspending/overrunning (student loans, new doctors system, NHS database.... the list seems endless). I'm having some correspondence with my MP about it who agrees (and he is labour!) that things don't seem very fair. This is supposed to be the mumsnet election so maybe a few more emails to MPs and prospective MPs might help!

I entered into lengthy correspondence with my MP (also labour) about the premium rate phone lines and being charged twice for the calls, and he agreed it was wrong as well.

Rumour has it that the hike in passport prices is to cover the introduction of the ID card scheme, but that might be an urban myth.

Bucharest - I think you are right. There was a £10m write off, spookily, in 2008 because of a disasterous Siemens system. Perhaps child passports and premium phone lines are helping to plug that gap and to pay for the ID cards. The increase in cost of a passport far exceeds the rate of inflation, CPI or RPI. In 2005 a child's passport was £25 and in 5 years the price has gone up 100%. My salary certainly hasn't gone up 100% in the last 5 years!

Our dd has used hers a lot. She was born in Oman and had her first passport issued when she was 8 days old. It cost about twice as much as it would had we been in the UK. Her second one was issued when she was 5 from the embassy in Bangkok. We were never offered the option onepair mentioned. On the positive side, she doesn' tneed to get visas the way even Australians do.