Dear LPG

I have just read about another of the ‘if’ situations that will arise depending on what happens with the Brexit predicament, and wondered if everyone knows.

This one is to do with your passport which, as we all know, is valid for 10 years once you part with as much as £85.00 to get it renewed.   Apparently, depending on where we end up after the national parting of the ways (if there is a parting of the ways), travellers will need to not only have a valid passport in order to travel to most of Europe, they will need to have a passport that is valid for at least 6 months after the day they plan to arrive at their European destination.

I decided to renew earlier this year and found this out when I did it, but it occurs to me that there are many people who travel now and then and who will only find this out when they decide to get their little red book out in preparation for the day of their departure.

I know that most of us have an idea of when our personal passport runs out but it is a bit like your M O T or car tax if you’re not careful; you’re never exactly sure, so it is worth checking.

The bottom line is that the government have found yet another way to get more money out of us because although we pay for a ten year passport it is effectively now only valid for nine and a half because of yet another rule change.  The passport office has also decided to only issue passports from the date they do the necessary admin; so when passport holders apply early in order to make sure that it remains valid, they no longer take the expiry date of your old one into account. They say that your new passport will get back to you about three weeks after you send it off but, in my experience it is worth getting your application in with a bit more notice than that.

I suppose we should count ourselves lucky.  They haven’t changed the ‘free passports for over 90 year olds’… yet!

CT, Brockley

LPG found some information on the subject…

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