WRITTEN ON July 8th, 2009 BY William Heath AND STORED IN Foundation of Trust, Identity, What do we want?

Oh great. Our passports (which cost IPS a few quid each from the outsourced contractor) are already absurdly expensive. And now Phil Woolas wants to make them even more expensive, including the pointless ones for children:

Phil Woolas (Minister of State (the North West), Home Office; Oldham East & Saddleworth, Labour)

Together with the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, I am announcing that the Privy Council has been asked to approve changes to passport fees at their meeting tomorrow by amending the Consular Fees (No. 2) Order 2009, which gives authority for a change in passport fees. The change will take effect on 3 September 2009.

The fees for passport applications made in the UK are as follows; the fee for a standard adult 32 page passport will increase from £72 to £77.50 while the fee for an adult 48 page passport will increase from £85 to £90.50. The fee for a passport for a child will increase from £46 to £49.00. The fee for an adult using the guaranteed one week counter service for a standard 32 page passport will increase from £97 to £112.50, for a 48 page from £105 to £120.50 and for a child from £81 to £96.50. The fee for an adult using the guaranteed same day service for a standard 32 page passport will increase from £114 to £129.50, for a 48 page passport from £123 to £138.50 and for a child from £94 to £109.50. The standard adult passport will continue to be issued for free to applicants born on or before 2 September 1929.

The fees for overseas passport applications made to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office are as follows; the fee for a standard adult 32 page passport will increase from £124 to £124.50. The fee for a passport for a child will increase from £79 to £79.50. The fee for an adult 48 page passport will increase from £150 to £150.50.

These fees have been set following a comprehensive review with HM Treasury of costs to ensure that the fee for each type of passport service fully reflects the production costs accrued by that service and bears its share of the cost of consular assistance services.

The rise will ensure the Identity and Passport Service and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office is able to continue to deliver the service its customers have come to expect and to deliver security enhancements to passports.

This is far from Ideal. We all have the right to leave the country under article 13 (2) of the UN’s universal declaration of human rights. But because of our own bureaucratic control-phreakery we have to pay loads of money to do it. Soon we have to go on an ID Register and get fined if we dont inform the state of changes in address and circumstances to exercise our basic himan right. We then receive these stupid fragile overpriced tokens which transmit our basic details with their insecure RFID chips. They’re not ours. They still belong to some politician. And we have to put up with incessant smugness about how wonderful the IPS’s service is, how secure the British passport is, and how the costs of the Benighted ID System are all an inevitability forced upon us by some unaccountable quango called ICAO which, it seems, we rigged in the first place.

Wibbi international procedures for identity and border control were formally designed in a manner to respect human dignity and rights in a straightforward and cost-effective way. Wibbi the agencies that constructed it were steeped in wisdom, empathy and accountability.