Residence card on cancelled passport

[romainriou]

Hello everyone.
I need some advice/feedback.
Her is the story in short:
I am French and my Russian wife got a residence card for 5 years in July 2010.
Then the passport was stolen in December.
She applied to the Russian embassy for a new passport just before Christmas. And got this new passport two weeks ago. The old one has been cancelled.
Se applied then for a new residence card (EEA2 application) last week (everything sent to Liverpool).
And last week (thanks to Facebook), somebody contacted us: they had found the old pasport lying on the street!
So now we have the old passport with the residence card inside.

First question:
-Is the residence card inside the cancelled passport still valid and enough to travel?

I know it is valid on an expired passport. But I would like to be 100% sure that it is ok on a cancelled passport as well. Because in that case we don't have to wait 4-6 months for a new residence card on the new passport. We called HO and they said they cannot give 100% certainty. Useless as usual. Then we called the Customs at Heathrow
and they said it is perfectly fine with the two passports...but if somebody here could confirm it, that would be nice.

Second question:
If the old residence card is enough, we would have to ask HO to send back the new passport we just sent.
How long does it usually take for them to send back the papers?

Any advice/past experience/comment is welcome.
Cheers,
Romain

[fysicus]

If you have no immediate travel plans, I would not do anything now. Having a residence card in your new passport as well won't hurt. The residence card in the old passport (amazing story by the way, that you got it back!) has not been revoked or otherwise invalidated by UKBA so I would agree with the people in Heathrow that you can still use it.

If at any time you need your new passport for travel, you can then ask the passport back if the application has not yet been processed.
When I did this in November last year via the dedicated email-address, it arrived after about a week.

The question that springs to my mind: how would an immigration officer of any country (except Russia of course) know that the old passport has been cancelled by the Russian authorities? After all, it cannot have been visibly invalidated by an official stamp or a big hole punched in it.

[romainriou]

Thank you Fysicus for your quick and useful answer.

The immediate travel plans: the Paris marathon in April (just me, but she was suppose to come to support me), one wedding in May, a friend gathering in June and some holidays in July (in France and in Spain). We had cancelled everything until now.
The wedding is the most important. We were so disappointed not being able to go. And now this could be possible again. Very tempting!

In fact you opened a new option I did not even think about!
This should have been my first question:
How risky is it to travel in the Shengen area with a cancelled Russian passport?
As you said, it is very unlikely an immigration officer will know that it has been cancelled, except the Russian autorities. Or not?

[mcovet]

Hey, nothing stops u from doing it at all. But to be on a safe side (u did report it lost botb to police and the russian embassy) and u didnt update either, it woild be wiser to carry both the new passport (if u withdrew ur application) and the old one with the rc inside. Even though the russian consulate may have cancelled the passport, the rc inside is still sufficient for use as is valid. Same as if ur old passport had expired but had a valid rc inside.

+1 on the fact u got it back though. Hope u got that person a nice thank u gift.

Thank you Fysicus for your quick and useful answer.

The immediate travel plans: the Paris marathon in April (just me, but she was suppose to come to support me), one wedding in May, a friend gathering in June and some holidays in July (in France and in Spain). We had cancelled everything until now.
The wedding is the most important. We were so disappointed not being able to go. And now this could be possible again. Very tempting!

In fact you opened a new option I did not even think about!
This should have been my first question:
How risky is it to travel in the Shengen area with a cancelled Russian passport?
As you said, it is very unlikely an immigration officer will know that it has been cancelled, except the Russian autorities. Or not?

[fysicus]

UKBA advises to request your passport back at least two weeks before you want to travel, and of course I would build in a bit of a safety margin myself.
Perhaps you can afford to wait a little longer until you get the Certificate of Application. In that case you can be pretty sure that UKBA will not ask the passport back when they are ready to process the application, but instead will issue the new RC on a standalone Immigration Status Document.

About passport control, I've given that a second thought and to be honest I would suspect that there could exist some international database (maintained by Interpol or that sort of organisation) containing data on all passports, that have been reported lost or stolen. You can now of course test this hypothesis: travel with both passports but initially only hand the old passport to the Immigration Officer and see what happens.