A child's passport now costs £49 and you get a 5 year passport. An adult's passport costs £77 and you get it for 10 years. The cost of passports is going up astronomically, far greater than the rate of inflation. Therefore it will cost at least £100 (£49 + £??) for a child to have a passport for 10 years but £77 for an adult to have a passport for 10 years. I can't think of anything else where the costs are 20%+ more expensive for a child than an adult. I appreciate that you could just say it is a family's choice to travel abroad but you also need a passport to travel in the UK if you want to fly and if you live in eg Scotland and need to visit family in eg London, it's a heck of a car journey! Adults also often use passports to open bank accounts, starting new jobs etc but children only use passports for travel so they don't get very good value out of them. Am I alone in thinking this doesn't seem very fair?
Interestingly the old system used to be that, as you had paid for 10 years, after 5 years you sent in a new photo and got another 5 year passport but that scheme was disbanded in 2008 which spookily coincided with a disastrous IT system by Siemens which had to be written off to the tune of £10m. Are our children subsidising a typical government IT system cock-up?
(I did post this info somewhere else until I realised that this was a better location)
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Passports for Children
1 reply
onepairofhands · 14/04/2010 20:44
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