Which one is the best value?

You’re currently required to go for a face-to-face passport interview, in a £115m scheme set up by the Government, and which helped push the price of your passport from £42 in 2005, up to £72.

The Daily Mail reports that of the 216,581 people who were interviewed in the 12 months up to July, none were found to be applying fraudulently.

Liberal Democrat Peer Lord Roberts of Llandudno, who obtained the figures, said the interviews “have not achieved what they were supposed to do. There have been over 200,000 interviews and zero rejections. What is the point of them? The millions of pounds spent on this project was a total waste of money.”

Security minister Lord West insisted that the interviews “act as a protection for British citizens against one form of identity theft.”

So if forking out £72 and travelling miles to an interview centre doesn’t appeal, the second option is to wait for a passport simply to fall into your lap.

The Daily Mail reports that “FIVE passports are lost in the post every day by Home Office” and says that this has “raised fears they may have fallen into the hands of terrorists or fraudsters.”

The story quotes figures uncovered by the Liberal Democrats showing that a total of 12,200 passports were lost in the post by government officials between 2001 and 2007.

Chris Huhne, Liberal Democrat Shadow Home Secretary said,

“We all know that things can go missing, but these figures again demonstrate an almost institutionalised carelessness.

“It beggars belief that a secure courier service can be losing passports in transit at the rate of two a day.

“People will be rightly concerned that the Government cannot be trusted with something as personal as a passport.”