January 17th - What you need to know about passport expiry
Simon Calder's Independent Travel Podcast
The Independent
3.6 • 628 Ratings
🗓️ 17 January 2023
⏱️ 7 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
There's been quite a bit of confusion around passport validity and expiry times with regards to being able to travel, with Brexit leading to changes for British travellers. I've received huge volumes of questions on the matter and with Charlotte Hindle I answer your questions around passports and when and where requires more than six months on your existing passport.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder and once again I am joined by my excellent colleague Charlotte Hindle who is going to pose the questions that many of you are asking. |
| 0:16.0 | On the thorny question today of passport validity, you've got your passport, it's 10 years old, |
| 0:24.6 | or that's what it says it is, maybe a bit longer, what could possibly go wrong? |
| 0:32.5 | Okay, so the reason why I thought it was a really good idea to bring up this subject is that lots and lots of people are just emailing you and saying and giving all of their passport details and asking you to check whether their passport is valid for a trip to Europe. |
| 0:51.1 | So I just wondered if we could just do like a sort of a step-by-step guide in terms of what you need to check when and what the first thing is that you should check. |
| 1:00.7 | But just at the beginning, what's happened? What's the history behind this? |
| 1:05.4 | Well, up to all Brexit or the Brexit withdrawal agreement taking effect on the 1st of January 2021, |
| 1:14.8 | we had for decades been in the happy position that your passport was valid up to |
| 1:20.7 | and including its expiry date for travel within Europe. |
| 1:25.7 | With the Brexit referendum and the withdrawal agreement that the government negotiated, |
| 1:31.8 | we demanded from Europe that we were treated as third country citizens. |
| 1:38.1 | That means that we become subject to the same rules as dozens of other countries |
| 1:43.9 | where they have passports where you don't need a visa, |
| 1:48.6 | but you do need to meet some quite strict validity conditions. |
| 1:53.0 | Okay, so if we, is the first thing that we need to do, do we need to look at our passport |
| 1:58.8 | or do we need to look at our entry point into Europe or even our exit point? So when we're coming back? Which one do we |
| 2:08.0 | look at first? Well, you just need to look at the issue date and the expiry date of your |
| 2:13.6 | passport. Okay. So if we're looking at the issue date, what are we looking for? |
| 2:22.3 | Well, your passport cannot be more than 10 years old on the day you intend to enter the European Union. |
| 2:30.9 | And the wider Schengen area, which includes Switzerland, Iceland, Norway and |
| 2:37.0 | lots of little countries as well. So for example, if your passport was issued on say the |
| 2:45.2 | 1st of February 2013 then you wouldn't be able to use it for travelling outbound to the European Union after |
... |
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