New passport applicants must go for interviews

Alan Travis
The Guardian
Mar. 22, 2007

More than 600,000 people a year applying for a passport for the first time will from May have to attend a compulsory interview up to 20 miles from their home, it was announced yesterday.

The new applicants, half of whom will be aged 16 to 19, will be asked to prove their identity by responding to a stock of about 200 possible questions on their family and financial history.

The admission that each passport application would be checked against a dossier of personal information drawn from existing government databases led anti-ID card campaigners to argue that it undermined ministers' claims that the passport/identity card would not involve any more information than existing passports.

The Home Office yesterday justified the intention to open a network of 69 passport and identity card offices by releasing an estimate saying that up to 10,000 passports were being issued by post to fraudulent applicants each year.

Officials said compulsory interviews would curb most fraudulent applications as the majority of these came from people involved overseas in organised illegal immigration rings. But they also cited the cases of two convicted terrorists. One was a leading al-Qaida figure, Dhiren Barot, who obtained two passports using false identities and seven in his own name.

The Conservatives last night described that admission as "shocking", but the Home Office said details of the fraud in the two terrorist cases had been publicised at the time of the trials. Officials pointed out that Barot, as a British citizen, was able to apply for a UK passport anyway.

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrats' home affairs spokesman, said security features and targeted interviews would do more to combat fraud than forcing through an expensive ID scheme.

Compulsory interviews will start at the Glasgow, Peterborough, Newport and Belfast offices in May, with the rest of the country following by the end of the year. James Hall, chief executive of the Identity and Passport Service, said that 95% of the population would be within 60 minutes' travel of a centre from either their home or workplace, and most would be only 15 minutes away. The Home Office minister Joan Ryan told MPs that though the plan might be a little inconvenient, "asking people to travel something like 20 miles to a 20-minute interview to protect their identity is reasonable".

Remote video-conferencing facilities are to be set up in 25 locations in rural Scotland and north Wales where applicants would need to travel for more than 60 minutes to reach their interviews. Offices will be open on Saturdays to accommodate those who cannot attend during working hours.

At the interviews the new passport applicants' identities will be confirmed by answering questions about themselves. Mr Hall said that the questions would be drawn from a stock of 200 based on the "social footprint" of each applicant, including their family history, current household, including all occupants, past addresses, financial background, including mortgage data and credit references, and even the background of the person countersigning the form.

The questions will be based on information from electoral registers, birth and marriage certificates, bank mortgage rolls and credit reference agencies. "They will be asked questions that only they know the answer to," said Mr Hall.

Teenagers are likely to be asked about their parents and their background, and who else lives at home with them.

Phil Booth, of the No2ID campaign, described the network of offices as "interrogation centres" and said the 20-minute "grilling" was now to be based on a dossier on private lives, built by bureaucrats.

From 2009, fingerprints will also be taken from each applicant.

The Home Office said that the personal information arising at the interviews would be destroyed once the passport was issued and no one would pass or fail the interviews. Those who fail to satisfy the interviewer that they are genuine will be referred to anti-fraud experts and be asked to attend another interview or provide further documentary proof.

The Home Office said that as passports were issued under the royal prerogative there was no formal appeal procedure. Instead an "escalating complaints" procedure would be available for those refused a passport.