CONFIDENTIAL
-3-
Q
some old style passports into the nineties. Home Office officials
are in the process of submitting to the Home Secretary on the
question of slippage.
5. Six Member States
and
and Belgium have now begun to introduce the CFPs.
Ireland, France, Italy, Denmark, Luxembourg
Germany and the
Netherlands have told us they intend to begin issuing in 1987.
Greece's intentions remain unclear but it seems likely that they will
issue a manual CFP by 1987. We therefore look like being the last.
6. Our Community partners accepted the logic of our linking the
introduction of the CFP with machine readability and computerisation,
and understand why we could not introduce the CFP until 1987. There
has nevertheless been a certain amount of grumbling in the People's
Europe Committee and elsewhere. This criticism has been rebutted
by firm restatements by Mr Williamson and others of the Home Secretary's
commitment to introduce the CFP by 1987. A further delay would
therefore give rise to strong reactions from our partners who might
It would also, of course, make us
begin to doubt our commitment.
look technically incompetent.
Why can't we do ct'.
tif Frogs she ca
?
7. If we are to avoid the suspicion that we are deliberately
dragging our feet, we must either accelerate the introduction of
computerisation or explore the possibility of starting manual issue
in the common format in 1987. In principle this should be no more
difficult than issuing an old style passport. Manually issued
passports would not of course be machine readable. We should
therefore lose the presentational advantage of making these
changes in one operation.
But we would forestall EC criticism.
CONFIDENTIAL
18.