TheJakartaPost
Please Update your browser
Your browser is out of date, and may not be compatible with our website. A list of the most popular web browsers can be found below.
Just click on the icons to get to the download page.
Back to blue: UK passports revert to old color from next month
Britain will start re-introducing traditional blue passports next month, replacing the burgundy European Union documents that have been in use since 1988.
Change Size
The close-up detail of the cover of a European Union British passport is seen in Paris on January 23, 2013. (REUTERS/Mal Langsdon)
B
ritain will start re-introducing traditional blue passports next month, the interior ministry said on Saturday, replacing the burgundy European Union documents that have been in use since 1988.
Reverting to the dark blue of pre-EU days has been a point of pride for many Britons who voted to leave the bloc in a 2016 referendum - even though the new passport will be made by a Franco-Dutch firm.
“By returning to the iconic blue and gold design, the British passport will once again be entwined with our national identity and I cannot wait to travel on one,” Home Secretary (interior minister) Priti Patel said in a statement.
Britain formally left the EU at the end of January and introduction of the new passport will be phased in from early March. From mid-2020, all new passports will be blue.
The blue cover is a return to the original appearance of the British passport, with the color first used in 1921, the ministry said.
Read also: Brexit sends Britons seeking Irish passports up 22 percent in 2018
The back cover will also carry its own symbolic design – the floral emblems of England, Northern Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.
The new passport will incorporate new security features, including a super-strength polycarbonate data page. It also includes printing and design techniques to give better protection against identity theft and forgery.
Awarding the 260 million pound ($335 million) contract to a foreign firm, Gemalto, with a French parent company Thales, generated some awkward headlines three years ago for then Prime Minister Theresa May.
"Sacre Bleu" commented the Daily Mail, while the former CEO of the British De La Rue printing company that lost the contract did not mince his words.
"I’m going to have to go and face (our) workers, look them in the whites of the eyes and try and explain to them why the British government thinks it’s a sensible decision to buy French passports not British passports,” Martin Sutherland told BBC radio at the time.
