MillieF

I find this astounding, and shall follow Oink's advice.

Zoe Bell

The air and space museums are well worth a trip in their own right. I'll probably renew mine he next time I'm forced to travel to Bethesda for work

iaink

It would be far more expensive to have a full time facility in Canada to serve the relatively small number of Brits here. The thing that killed the Canada office was the move to biometrics and more secure passports. As it is the passports themselves are made centrally in the UK, so I guess its cheaper to have a few people in Washington take care on NorthAmerica.


I suppose they could have had the american based brits send their applications to Ottawa instead.....


I suspect the cost of travel to and accomodation in washington wont make going there any cheaper. Still no idea where $500+ came from though, its more like $250.

Steve_

If you don't already know, the logic was that the machinery needed to make the passports and comply with the National Identity Register was really expensive so they moved all the processing to a handful of locations, in North America it's Washington DC. But then the NIR was scrapped so now it looks stupid.

I'm not sure it makes any practical difference unless you were planning on doing it in person.

Steve_

There are estimated to be nearly as many in Canada as in the US, low 600,000s in Canada and high 600,000s in the US.

Valid question as to why they chose DC over Ottawa though. I'm guessing because they have as low of an opinion of Canada Post as we do. Plus you can't used MC/Visa debit cards in Canada.

scrubbedexpat091

You can use Visa/MC debit cards in Canada when they are not issued by a Canadian bank. My US Visa debit works fine and dandy in Canada.

pdarwin

But back to my point that the German embassy in Ottawa are issuing biometric passports to German citizens are there must be only a fraction of German nationals living here compared to the number of Brits.
The British Consulate here could at least do the processing from Canada and they could send it wherever to get done. It's just Brit officials being cheap again.

Steve_

Well Canada and Britain are setting up joint consulates now in some countries.

BristolUK

If we are Brits in Canada and our renewal passports are being processed and issued in another country, why aren't we having our passports renewed by that same other country rather than dealing with a different other country?

It should only cost more for us than for UK residents because of additional mailing costs.

Shouldn't it?

Almost Canadian

I suspect you need to aim this question at the relevant union