Question for the British Contingent...
 

Has anyone renewed a British passport recently, and if so how long did it take?

I am hoping to go away at Easter, but on checking last night found that mine will have expired by then.

(Ideally I don't want to pay for the expedited processing - it's already £77 just for the basic service!!!).

Less than 2 weeks I think. Renewed it last year in June

I renewed mine and got it back in a week, but that was at the Amsterdam Consulate ;).

If you do it now I'm sure it will be back before Easter.

I went to Petty France. It took a couple of hours but cost a fortune (a ton or so I seem to remember). Thankfully I could claim it back - but it struck me as a fortune at the time.

Use 'check and send' service at a post office or selected travel agent, where average processing time is two weeks. Easter is still two months away.

I did mine by check and send...

Ta all.

It's here! It's here!

£77 poorer, but now the proud owner of a new biometric passport.

BTW, Does anyone else have budgies as a watermark?

(They're even on the photo page - one is pecking my head!).

Ha, henpecked are you?

Looked at mine, not expiring until October 2016, and the very faint watermarks are flowers and butterflies, or some such design that looks quite 70s-ish.

They're both quite girlie watermarks aren't they?

I wonder if blokes gets cars or guns or summat.

God I must be bored!! But I just had to go and look at my kids' passport, all issued on the same date in September '06.

3 expire in March 2012, 1 expires in March 2017.

All have the pecking budgie/sparrow/finch on the photo page. The other pages have an assortment of birds, parrots, ones-with-long-beaks-but-not-herons. Therse pics are quite clear, more so than watermarks and those in my passport.

I last renewed mine in March '06. Maybe it just depends on the month you apply in as to what piccies you get in your passport?

I am sure that CW will come up with a jolly good reason for all this passport fuss.

BTW, Petty France is the name of a village in Gloucestershire, straddling the A46 close to Chipping Sodbury. We were always led to believe that it was named thus because some refugees from the French Revolution settled here after escaping The Terror. Now because I am bored I shall to go and google this to see if it is true or if I have been misled as a child.

My previous one had spirograph patterns in it.

Can't remember the one before that - it was one of the black ones though - so probably completely plain, since fraud and counterfeiting hadn't been invented way back then.....

BTW, I was also misled as a child. My mum told me that my grandfather invented catseyes, and I spent half my childhood repeating this to anyone I met. Only to discover in my first secondary school physics lesson that it was someone else entirely....

I'd like some advice. You know the new British passport has a microchip in it so you can wizz through controls etc, how far way do criminals need to pass near you before they can read you passport and what sort of faraday's cages are there to protect you from their activities?

The birds with long beaks which are not herons are avocets.

Avocets exist ! I thought they were only found in crossword puzzles and scrabble (along with the Smee).

I thought they were some kind of missile!

The place near Chipping Sodbury is also called Dunkirk. Further down the A46 towards Bath is Pennsylvania.

Are the biometric passports capable of being forged by the Israelis? I am surprised that nobody on Fodors has yet commented that a number of Brits living in Israel had their identities stolen by the Israeli authorities while they were passing through immigration control. These identities were then used by a Mossad assassination squad who murdered a Palestinian leader in Dubai.

And people worry about Italian hotel keepers.

On a more serious note, the renewal process seems to be really quite stringent now.

I know of three people who have had their renewals declined for very minor reasons, including photographs not being up to standard (despite their being nothing obviously wrong, face forward, correct size, neutral expression etc), tiny bits of pen touching the white boxes (I filled mine in online having been warned about this in advance), and lastly, new info not matching details shown on old passport - which is unavoidable in some cases since the new form asks different questions to the last one.

E.g. New form does not ask for middle names to be submitted any more (first name and surname only specified), hence if you put middle names, technically you are filling in the form incorrectly and could be declined, hence if you don't it won't match your old passport and you could also be declined.

(This actually happened to me and I had to fill in a second form and write a covering letter to explain I had not changed my name. At one point, the passport office were also trying to get me to get a justice of the peace/notary(?) to countersign my letter - thankfully they backed down when I pointed out that it really was overkill for someone who was on their 4th passport renewal and hadn't actually changed their name at any point).

But if you are in Mossad, no worries.....;-)

LOL Chartley.... great minds think alike......

RM67 - I'm bored so I checked the latest passports, both renewed in the US.

Mine has the bird about to peck my eye out and a hologram
of wings over my photo.

My Son's face is covered by a hologram that has clover, daffodils, thistles and roses :? So... there's your answer, No guns or manly stuff :)

Mine has