3. Mrs P complains about the service she had from HMPO. In particular, she says in September 2021 HMPO did not let her know her passport was no longer ‘valid’.
4. As a result, she says she was left humiliated and upset at the airport when she could not travel. She also says she missed out on her holiday and lost all costs of the holiday.
5. She would like financial compensation for missed holiday and all the costs involved.
6. Mrs P says her passport was issued in August 2011, so it would expire in August 2021. She renewed, it six months early to allow her to continue to travel, as at the time you could add the six months onto the validity, so it expired at the end of February 2022. She says when she went to travel in September 2021, she was unable to, due to the new Brexit ruling. She is unhappy HMPO did not tell her about this change.
9. We do not think HMPO did anything wrong. This is because unfortunately, it seems Mrs P misunderstood the purpose of a passport and the rules around entering other countries.
10. A passport is a means of identification for the holder to prove they are who they say they are (and that they are from the country they say they are from). However, a passport does not give automatic entry to another country, it simply makes the process easier. It is for the individual country to set its own rules about who it allows to enter (and what evidence it needs to support the right of entry).
11. Before Brexit, as members of the EU, UK citizens enjoyed freedom of movement across EU countries (of which Greece is one). Since Brexit, things have changed, and some countries are stricter about what documents they wish to see before allowing someone to enter the country. In a lot of cases, this has seen many countries asking for evidence that a passport is valid for a fixed period. HMPO has no control over those rules or those requirements.
12. In this case the only thing we can look at is whether HMPO gave enough information to people about passport validity. Mrs P says HMPO should have told her that her passport had ‘expired’ in August 2021. This is not correct. Her passport did not ‘expire’ until February 2022 (it was still a means of identification until that time).
13. Mrs P suggests that, even if the passport was still a valid document, HMPO should have told her she may have problems using it. HMPO issued the passport in 2011 so it could not have predicted the change to the rules (caused by Brexit) which led to this situation. It does appear that, once the rules changed, HMPO issued general guidance on its website about the possible effects of these changes. We would not have expected HMPO do more in this situation. We would not have expected it to send specific advice to Mrs P about her travel plans to Greece. This is in line with our principles of good administration, ‘acting fairly and proportionately’.
14. Mrs P says that when she checked the rules, it said the passport needed to be valid for three months from the date of entry to Greece. As she met this, she was not expecting a problem. There appears to be a misunderstanding by Mrs P of the relevant rules. According to HMPO’s website, there are two criteria for passport validity when travelling to Greece.
15. Mrs P is correct to say it needed to be valid for three months. However, it also needed to be issued ‘less than 10 years before the date you enter the country’. It seems likely Mrs P did not meet this requirement. HMPO’s website says the traveller must check their passports meet both requirements before travelling. It goes on to say that if the passport was issued before 1 October 2018, extra months may have been added to its expiry date (as appears to have happened here).
16. We can also see that HMPO did not refuse to allow Mrs P to travel, the airline did. If Mrs P believed her passport met the relevant criteria, her complaint would need to be to the airline, not HMPO.
1. We have carefully considered Mrs P’s complaint about HM Passport Office (HMPO).
• We have seen no signs that anything went seriously wrong and we are satisfied HMPO did enough to communicate changes in guidance.
2. We are sorry to hear about the circumstances of Mrs P’s complaint and we appreciate her experience at the airport was upsetting. We also appreciate losing a holiday would have been deeply distressing and we are sorry to hear this happened.