Lucky Lucan

Well I can tell you that my wife just received her new passport two and a half weeks after posting it from Melbourne.

Beermonster

When I had to travel back to the UK for my fathers funeral, my UK passport had recently expired, but I was travelling on my AU passport. Whilst in the UK, I arranged to renew my UK passport using the Premium service. Basically you make an appointment with a nominated Passport Office, turn up with the completed application form, old passport and 128 quid and your new passport will be ready for pickup in 4 hours. OK a fair bit more expensive, and you may need to travel and hang around for 4 hours, but at leat you get the thing in your hand quick

Briar

Brilliant Beermonster. I have been following this thread and the news online about the disaster that renewing a Brit passport has become and now that I am an Australian Citizen and passport holder I had just about decided to let my Brit Passport lapse as I couldn't be faffed. However, I am back in UK in 6 weeks for a holiday and will renew it using this Premium service. I read about it on their website and was wondering whether to give it a go.

ethan2

anyone ever used a prepaid Visa credit card online to pay for their UK passport renewal?

DanSolihull

I noticed the other day when getting my documents together for PR that my passport expires in October, I've just sent it off to the UK by recorded post, they said it will take 1-2 weeks to get there. The website then says it takes upto 6 weeks to process so I'm assuming a further 1-2 weeks to come to me, at worst case 10 weeks but from experience what am I looking at realistically?

jad n rich

Ours took about 4 months, I would say that is absolute worst case scenario. Even with that you would be fine for October. The reason ours took so long was because they insisted mine was a forgery. It certainly was not, but that was the reason but even with that I have to admit the lady handling the case kept in constant email contact. Just required another shipload of paperwork to keep them happy including stuff from my parents parents etc, Crazy, I am sure most people would not even have that stuff!!

I am sure they usually take nothing like that timeframe anyway.

After that episode I renewed the Australian one 6 months before expiry and it came back in 2 weeks.

DanSolihull

So 3 weeks to the day from posting my form and old passport to the UK (from Brisbane) I received my new passport today. Pretty good turnaround and much better than I expected.

shaozzy

Just letting people know that I sent my passport on 17th June and received it yesterday!!! Amazing! � ����� ����

Briar

That's good Shaozzy.

I renewed mine at the London Passport Office whilst in UK in March. I had to be in London for business that day, so waiting around for 4 hours was not a problem. All went well and they had a very good system going that passed everyone on effciently. It took 5 minutes to lodge the application and have paperwork checked, then go up to the accounts office and pay. All up I was in the building less than 25 minutes and they sent me a text when the passport was ready to collect. Took them less than 4 hours to process. Was worth the extra fee to have it dealt with asap.

davidclifford

I applied for and sent a renewal of my passport on 30th July from Melbourne and got passport back on 11th August, 13 days later, Amazing!

astera

How picky are they with passport photos and all the dimension requirements mentioned in the guidelines? Are they super-strict with applications being rejected due to minuscule discrepancies or does everything flow, especially when it comes to kids' photos?

Briar

Extremely picky I found. I renewed my Australian passport around the same time so used photos I had from that for my Brit passport. They wouldn't accept the photo as they were "not taken in UK" even though they filled all the criteria. Go figure! Tried explaining that the Australian government had accepted the same photo and even showed my Australian passport, but the "Jobsworth" behind the counter insisted they were not acceptable. Fortunately there was a photo booth in the lobby and five minutes later I had new photos.
There was a queue for the photo booth, so guessing my situation wasn't unique.

Pollyana

When I got my Aussie one, I was renewing the Uk one at the same time, and they tried to tell me it was illegal to have the same photo on my UK one as one my Aussie one!

astera

Hmmm, seems like someone there has an interest in directing people to the photo booth.

Whoa, what a load of nonsense. Sometimes it's amazing how people with no clue about something can give the most idiotic advice or make up such incredulous, non-existent rules.

Does the UK still require a copy of every single page of the Aussie passport (or any other passports held) to be submitted with the UK passport application?

moneypenny20

Unless it's changed, both countries have different criteria for the photos so one won't work for the other. Same the world over, the 'rules' some countries have are bizarre. Not sure how they can argue about the photo being taken from outside the country. That makes no sense. They presumably don't expect all expats to fly 'home' to have their picture taken.