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My sister, who lives in the US, has not renewed her now expired UK passport for a number of years. She still have the old, blue passport. She now is trying to renew. UKPA is telling her she now needs to prvide ORIGINAL documents (marraige certificate, birth certificate, parent's birth certificates etc). Both parents are deceased and while some documents she can get, our parents were born in 1923/4 - and our Father born in Chile (but to British parents are registered as British), others are harder. My query is WHY is all this needed> So what if she is renewing many years after expiy? She hads a valid passport so why is this treated as a NEW application when it is really just a renewal? It is a real pain to have to try to get all the original docs again. Surely UKPA just makes more work for themselves and everyone else? Anyonse shed any light on this?

I sympathise but these are the current requirements. Clearly this is difficult from a distance and for details going back many years. Newly naturalised citizens here must provide original certificates and originals of uncancelled passports which includes foreign issued passports. Very unnerving to send your originals, even via secure post. One of the reasons for this is that HMPO want to avoid multiple documents in circulation showing different names for the same person. This is different from using previously issued documents as proof. No consolation of course.

Thanks for the response. My question is WHY (if you know) it is a current requirement. The bureaucratic agencies just seem to love to create work - for themselves and for ev eryone else. Surely if one has an EXISTING UK passport (however old) the assumption should/must be that it was validly issued. Why go back to SQUARE ONE and chase down the original documents. It makes no sense (at least to me). UKPA seems overstretched, as it is. Why not just treat all renewals as, just that, and focus on harder cases. But then I am not a bureaucrat!

If you haven't looked here already:
british-citizenship/british-passport-po ... 84012.html

Thanks and very helpful