Sneaky increases, that's what this government has been all about. Little price rise there, small tax hike there, better put that tax up by 1p, increase that duty by 2p. And now they have done it again.
The price of a passport is to go up by a fiver. Er, why? It's a passport, the price is set and it costs what it costs. Have they employed more people? Have they increased the technology in secret after the biometrics of a couple of years ago? Has the price of the paper gone up?
Five British pounds. Five pounds fifty to be precise. That takes it to £77.50, an increase of 7.6%. For a passport. I have to keep repeating it because I can't really believe it. There must be a reason for it, what has someone official go to say?
Immigration minister Phil Woolas said the price increase would maintain "the high standards in customer service and document security British citizens have come to expect"We here at B and D love Woolas, that complete tool who thinks Gurkhas are dirty foreigners raping our nuns. Only Labour could react to tabloid immigration demands by banning the Gurkhas.
It is also mentioned that 8 million of the new passports have been dished out since 2007. So the earliest won't be running out until 2017. I would imagine this would cause a fair problem, but the number of passports per year must be fairly steady surely?
In turn the income from passports is allegedly ring fenced according to the BBC. It must be the recession then, meaning people are being bad and slacking off their yearly fly away and hitting revenues. Tell you what Phil, whack the prices up, that'll learn 'em.
Of course this wouldn't the first time. In 2005 they went up 21%. In 2006 they went up 29% to 'pay' for the new technology. In 2007 they went up again and was "needed to maintain the quality of British consular services abroad", this time by 9%. They left it last year, which was nice of them.
So, in four years the price of a passport has increased by 85%.
Each year is a new reason, first to pay for the new technology, then to pay for helping people abroad, then it's to cover the costs of 'stuff and that, you know'. Now they have just given up and said it's to continue the great service. Which is double speak for give us yer money.
The increases are there solely for the ID card fiasco and the massive infrastructure we have given hundreds of millions of pounds to IBM and others to build. The Service must support itself so it simply uses passports as a product, putting up prices to pay for whatever it is doing. Service betterment is a load of rubbish.
A good article on this can be found here, which goes into some numbers.
The thing is, it is highly unlikely that ID cards will ever be put into service. The Tories have pledged to scrap the scheme when they get in and only last week Brown removed the need for airport employees to have an ID card. But I will bet you anything you like the price of your passport won't go down.
They don't like Freedom of Information requests do they? Good, because I have felt the need to ask the Identity and Passport Service how much the unit cost of a passport is. I await the excuse for not telling me.
I tell you what though, they better be expensive.
4 comments:
I really hope you do ask that Kevin, because it would indeed be fascinating to know the answer, one way or the other.
Just imagine you had a product and you decided to hike the price of it by 85% over four years.....your customers would tell you fuck off and go elsewhere for said product.....and rightly so.
But these bastards aren't governed by competition, no one else but they can provide. So not only do they have us over a barrel, we are being anally raped at the same time.
When is the revolt?
Well I think competition in the passport market is probably a bit far fetched! But the self financing thing seems a bit odd because it isn't like people really have a choice.
If they have to be subsidised by general taxation then so be it, but I have a feeling that the unit cost will reveal the price could be much lower.
I have sent off my little FoI request and I fail to see how they can justify not telling me.
Purely anecdotal, but.....
I went for a 'passport interview' about eighteen months ago despite the fact I'd already had a passport and supplied a birth certificate/NHS card, blah blah blah.
Anyway, the place was massive, easily a good 20000 sq ft (the actual interview area was half of this, another half was a 'back office' bit) there was a receptionist, a guy who was 'stood there' not really sure what his job was. Whilst I was there one other person was waiting for an interview and infact he was the only other person there for about half an hour, I dare say in the summer it gets a lot busier but the whole thing seemed like an epic waste, even the interview was pointless. I was expecting that they'd actually have done some work so they could correlate me with what wasn't on the form, ie - by asking me what school I went to, what hospital I was born in, any major operations, etc. None of that, the woman simply read the application form back to me whilst I confirmed what was on it.
It probably would have been easier and cheaper to get a fake one to be honest.
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