My new passport heralds a new world
I had to renew my passport the other day as I’d been travelling so much in the last few years I’d filled the last one up with visas and border stamps in half a decade. If Brexit hadn’t happened it would have lasted the full ten years, but the requirement for a stamp on entry and exit to every European country had put paid to that.
If the passport office had wanted to check each of those border stamps to ensure that I hadn’t overstayed in Europe, they’d have had quite a task. A number of the stamps were partly illegible due to a lack of ink. It’s surprising that the world relies on such an outdated system to check border control in the digital age.
You’d assume that the EU countries would have a shared database to ensure UK residents don’t overstay in the territory, but this is not the case, except for visa applications. This will all change, however, when the automated, much-delayed, sexily-titled European Travel Information and Authorisation System (ETIAS) and the EU Entry/Exit System (EES) are introduced at borders. These IT systems are currently expected to be implemented late this year.
It is likely that with the EES system, non-EU/Schengen citizens who do not require a visa to enter the EU will be required to have their fingerprints and facial images taken. The antiquated border stamp ritual will become obsolete.
The UK is in a perilous state right now, but remarkably I received my new passport in nine days. From what I can see, the Passport Office is the only state-run organisation operating well in the country right now.
Not that it hasn’t had its problems. This time last year a damning report from the Committee of Public Accounts found that hundreds of thousands of people had missed out on holidays, family emergencies, weddings and business trips due to ‘unacceptable’ lengthy passport delays due to chaos at the Passport Office.
It was a great feeling to open the envelope and find that my new passport is black, as in days of old, rather than the burgundy-coloured European Union one. Brexit was well worth it for this improvement alone.
But wait - Brits never had black passports in the past. Even the Home Office has clarified this in a statement: “Since its introduction in 1921, there have been a few variants of that navy blue colour but it has never been black, as some commentators have suggested.”
Some people say the new UK passports look blue in some lights, but I can’t see that with mine. Maybe different batches are in different colours. Also, British passports are made in Poland - which seems to go against the whole Brexit vibe.
And we didn’t actually need to leave the EU to get passports of a distinctly different colour to those of other EU countries. The burgundy colour widely used in the EU is recommended, but not mandated, by EU rules. Croatia issues EU passports in blue.