Mr. Marlowasked the Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs whether he has any plans to increase fees for passport and other consular services.
Mr. WhitneyYes. An Order in Council has recently been made — the Consular Fees Order 1983 — which provides for increases in passport and other consular fees with effect from next Monday 14 November. The fee for a standard 10-year passport will go up from the present £11 to £15 and that for a British visitors passport from £5.50 to £7.50. For a 10-year family passport, that is, with particulars of a husband or wife included, the fee will be £22.50 and for a family British visitors passport £11.25. The fee for a collective passport will be twice that for an individual 10-year passport, that is £30. There will be commensurate increases in fees for other passport services, and an average 55 per cent. increase in fees for non-passport consular services. United Kingdom visa fees will also be increased with effect from the same date. Even at the increased levels, United Kingdom passport fees are comfortably in line with those charged by other countries.
The increases will be the first since March 1978. Since then costs both at home and overseas have increased substantially. At home, for instance, prices have increased by 77 per cent. over the period: by comparison, the increase in the standard passport fee is 36.4 per cent. It is the policy of this and previous Governments that receipts from users of the passport and consular services should cover the full cost of their provision.
The increased fees for family and collective passports reflect special factors. Family passports take virtually as much work to issue as two individual passports. The Government have decided that the fee shall be one and a half times that for an individual passport. This is well below the recommendation of last year's Rayner scrutiny of the Passport Office that the fee should be twice the fee for an individual passport, less £2.
The Government have accepted the Rayner scrutiny recommendation that the collective passport fee should be twice the standard passport fee: a collective passport will still be an economical travel document since up to 50 young people can travel on it.