Lord Moonie – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Moonie on 2016-10-03.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Anelay of St Johns on 19 September (HL1756), how many British nationals they estimate are long-term residents in Italy; how many UK consular offices there are in Italy; when those consular offices ceased renewing passports for British nationals; how many renewals there were in the last year during which this service was provided; and how many emergency travel documents the Rome or Milan offices have issued in the past year.

Baroness Anelay of St Johns

1. In 2015 the UN, in their ‘Trends in International Migrant Stock: Migrants by Destination and Origin’ report, estimated that 64,986 British people were living in Italy.
2. As of October 2016 we have two permanent Consular Offices in Rome and Milan. These offices are supported by a network of five Honorary Consuls operating in Venice, Genoa, Catania (Sicily), Cagliari and Naples.
3. The processing of passport renewal applications from Italy was transferred to the Regional Passport Processing Centre in Paris in 2009. On 1 April 2011 an accord was signed between FCO and the Home Office to transfer responsibility for overseas passports to the Identity and Passport Service, now known as Her Majesty’s Passport Office (HMPO). The transition of application processing from the Regional Passport Processing Centre in Paris to HMPO began in June 2013. This included all applications made from Italy. This process concluded in March 2014. As part of this process, all records were transferred to HMPO, and the FCO does not hold records of the numbers of passports issued overseas.
4. In 2015 we issued 1,261 emergency travel documents from our Consular offices in Italy. 83 of those emergency travel documents were issued because of expired passports.