Good luck to anyone renewing a passport

diystarter7

Westin said:

I thought you had to send in your old passport with the new application. The passport office then return it to you (with corner clipped) after they have finished with it and cancelled it.

diystarter7 said:

daveyjp said:

diystarter7 said:

daveyjp said:

If you have sent it back just ignore the reminders!  You will get an email telling you it is received.

You are blocking the system with frivolous calls.

Last year I got my new passport within a few days.
Then message to send back the old which cost me money and time.
What if I had not bothered and just destroyed and disposed of it myself

If you had destroyed it it would show you hadn't read and understood the detail during the application process to return your old passport to the address they supply as part of the process.

True but I did destroy it as per my post but you have failed to answer my question

Anyone else - what if I was not to send it back, what would have happened?

I would expect you create problems for yourself and then get stuck in a loop of correspondence between you and the passport office.  Surely the system is creaking enough at the moment without you not following instructions from them. Little wonder the renewal wait times are slow for some people.

The thing people have already got their new passports, so whats the big deal?  As per my initial post here I had sent it back cost me time and money but as another asked, what if they had not.

Sandtree

Robin9 said:

rolls636363 said:

I did an online application, sent my old passport the next day via the secure post office expensive method, and it was signed for received the following morning.   So far so good..... not for long.  Now they are spamming me with text and email saying to send it my old passport.  OK, lets give them a phone call.  Good luck with that, been trying all day, they cut you off at various stages of waiting.  I must have tried well over a hundred times.   Oh, the online chat, lets try that.........oh thats down due to high volumes.  There is now no way left to contact them and query the loss of my old passport by them.  The system is a joke, shambles, laughing stock, there are no other words for it.  Looks like my daughters might be going on holiday without me

No problems with my recent renewal -  online form Sat April 24th, sent old passport by post the next day.. New passport came last Friday May 6th

Shows how variable it is, or how opaque the process is...  online form 31 Mar, sent docs 2 days later (acknowledge 13 Apr) and 6 May is when they raised their query. With a 4 week head start not sure how we only got the Q on the same date you got the replacement. 

TELLIT01

I've been following a topic on TripAdvisor from somebody who used the 1 week processing system and was panicking because the time had elapsed and they were going on holiday today.  Process started on 27th April.  To cut a long story short they received the passport on Monday.  Over the '1 week' but thankfully still in time.