Passport Photo Enforcement Again!

For the third year in a row, the former Passport Office (Now the Identity and Passport Service), is to attempt to enforce its controversial and disruptive 'new' standards for passport photos from January 1, 2008. The main change planned for 2008 is strict refusal of photos taken against a standard white background. However, the IPS is finally giving up on rejecting backprinted media. And the service has confirmed it has no plans to take passport photos itself in the foreseeable future. "There are no intentions to remove the requirement for all applicants to provide good quality photographs with their applications", the IPS said. The majority of photographs rejected by the IPS are those taken by the applicant themselves in photo booths. The new regulations have been a major factor contributing to the death of the photo booth market, and the present troubles of PhotoMe. The apparent arbitrariness of some of the new passport photo rules, confusingly sporadic enforcement, and continual U-turns by the IPS have eroded the credibility of Passport Service regulations over the years. In particular, the industry is quietly peed-off that, in its opinion, the most irksome new rules arise from the inadequacy of the scanning equipment chosen by the IPS rather than any inherent deficiencies in the actual photos presented to it. The whole backprinting issue has been a debacle. IPS scanning equipment couldn't cope with backprinting. No other territory in the world required passport photo media without backprinting, so manufacturers had to face the prospect of producing media just for the UK, or exiting the UK market. Some dived through hoops to find ways to supply non-backprinted media into the UK economically. Others took the issue into account when deciding to exit the UK market. All of this has turned out, through the IPS U-turn, to have been an unnecessary farce. (That particular regulation was only ever sporadically enforced anyway.) The issue of off-white backgrounds has similar origins in the peculiarities of the IPS's scanning equipment, rather than in any inherent unsuitability of photos on a white background for passport use. Now every studio in the country, every photo lab offering passport service, pharmacies and post offices, all need to switch to off-white backgrounds of 5% - 10% grey! Surely, given the vast scale of ID photography in the UK, the economic cost to the country of these years of farcical to-ing and fro-ing far outweighs whatever the cost of putting right the IPS's scanning equipment would have been?