Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment his Department has made of the potential merits of having a passport assessor in Hargeisa.

All applications for British passports are conducted by His Majesty’s Passport Office in the UK. This has removed the fraud risk of transporting blank books to, and safekeeping them in, overseas posts, as well as aligning security checks and fraud assessment processes to those conducted on applications made in the UK.

Through economies of scale and use of new technology, HM Passport Office substantially reduced processing costs. This has been passed on to the customer, with an adult overseas passport costing £33 less than when the transition from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office completed in March 2014.