The Identity and Passport Service (IPS) is an executive agency of the Home Office in the United Kingdom. The agency became operational on 1 April 2006, succeeding the UK Passport Agency, after the passing of the Identity Cards Act 2006.
The service provides passports for British nationals, and life event certificates such as birth, death, marriage and civil partnerships. The UK passport provides evidence of a person’s nationality and allows UK citizens to leave and re-enter the country.
All adult first time passport applicants are now required to attend an interview with the Identity and Passport Service in order to verify the identity and status of the applicant.
IPS' headquarters is in London and it has seven regional offices around the UK, in London, Glasgow, Newport, Belfast, Peterborough, Liverpool and Durham as well as an extensive interview office network. On 1 April 2008, the General Register Office for England and Wales (GRO) became a subsidiary of IPS.
Famous quotes containing the words united, kingdom, passport and/or service:
“When, in some obscure country town, the farmers come together to a special town meeting, to express their opinion on some subject which is vexing to the land, that, I think, is the true Congress, and the most respectable one that is ever assembled in the United States.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“A lifetime [or, eternity] is a child playing, playing checkers; the kingdom belongs to a child.”
—Heraclitus (c. 535–475 B.C.)
“Whenever [Leonard Bernstein] entered or exited a country he would fill in on his passport form not composer or conductor, but musician. Of course people in the press spent a lot of Lenny’s life telling him what he should have done; he should have been a concert pianist, he should have composed more.... And people wouldn’t let him live his own life. But he created his own career, in his own image.”
—John Mauceri (b. 1945)
“Night City was like a deranged experiment in Social Darwinism, designed by a bored researcher who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button. Stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone ... though heart or lungs or kidneys might survive in the service of some stranger with New Yen for the clinic tanks.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)