Oral question asked in the House of Lords, by Lord Campbell-Savours (Labour). It was answered on Wednesday, 18 January 2017.

Passport Applications: Digitisation

Question: Does this Question not take us straight back to the issue of authenticity of information in national identity documentation? Do Ministers realise that once an amateur takes a photograph, we could end up with civil servants arguing about whether that photograph is an exact image, whether it is dark, whether it was taken at the right angle, and whether it presents an image of the quality necessary to be put into an official document, with the result that they may end up having to return it to the sender for the sender to resubmit it? Is that not a waste of Civil Service time? It will cost the state money.

Answer: The noble Lord points out precisely the criteria used to measure quality and required for photographs. Those security standards are no different in the online application process than they were in the old paper process. There was no more risk of the customer getting it wrong under the old system than there is under the new system.

Secondary information