Passports

Lord Paddick Excerpts

Wednesday 10th April 2019 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

My noble friend makes a good point. Countries such as the US offer travellers leave to go for a fixed period of time so they can use their passport right up to the 10-year limit. It would therefore be rather confusing to make ours valid for 10 and a half years. I know exactly the point she is making, though.

[Lord Paddick (LD)]

My Lords, by the end of the year, some British passports will be blue, some will be maroon, some will have “European Union” on the front and some will not. Does the Minister agree that this will be confusing to not only British passport-holders but foreign security personnel, and that this increases the risk of forged passports going undetected because of the variety of official documents?

[Baroness Williams of Trafford]

I give the British public more credit for their intelligence than does the noble Lord. Of course, the Croatian passport is not burgundy, it is blue, and there is a reason for that. The Croatians did not want the association with communism writ large on their passports in the form of the red colour. Some people might rather like it, though. I do not think that it is confusing. The wrong thing to do would be to scrap a load of remade passports. There is absolutely no law against what we are doing. We intend to continue to make the blue passport available from later this year, and I look forward to ordering mine.