TNAG-1405-FCO40-1880-Future-of-Hong-Kong-passports-and-visas-1985 — Page 70

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.