SACRE BLEU! OUR NEW PASSPORTS TO BE MADE BY EU FIRM

Franco-Dutch company beats UK bidder

BRITAIN’S traditional blue passports – set for a comeback when the country leaves the EU – are to be made by a European firm. A Franco-Dutch company has won the contract to print the post- Brexit passports, it

emerged last night. They will replace the EU’s burgundy documents from October 2019.

Gemalto, which is listed on the French and Dutch stock exchanges and has a French chief executive, undercut British and other rivals by £50million, sources claimed. The contract for the passports was worth £490million – although senior Whitehall sources pointed out that the deal had not yet been signed.

Under EU rules, the Government could not favour a British company and had to choose the best-value bid. This was despite calls by MPs for a domestic firm to produce the new documents.

British company De La Rue, which

produces the current UK passport and banknotes, had said it would make a significant investment in its Gateshead site if it won.

Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg said last night: ‘I am very sorry to hear it, as De La Rue has a factory in my constituency. It seems odd to have a national symbol produced abroad.’

The final design of the passport is not known but firms across Europe raced to win the right to print it. De La Rue bid for the UK Passport Agency contract along with Gemalto and French company Oberthur Technologies.

In December last year the then immigration minister Brandon Lewis announced the UK passport would be changed to a blue and gold design – the colours used in the traditional British passport.

The navy blue documents were first produced in 1920. The burgundy version was introduced to the UK in 1988, some 15 years after Britain joined the EU.

A Home Office spokesman said: ‘ We are running a fair and open competition to ensure that the new contract delivers a high quality and secure product and offers the best value for money. We do not require passports to be manufactured from the UK.’

Tory MP Andrew Bridgen said: ‘Under EU rules the Government would not have had a choice, but in the future we need to look at the total benefit to the UK. The technology of passports is vital to border security and that technology ought to be kept in the UK.’

Gemalto is registered in Holland and has its headquarters in Amsterdam. It employs 15,000 people in 47 countries around the world.

De La Rue is the world’s biggest passport producer, with six plants in the UK. Each year it manufactures over 12million passports. It also makes 40 per cent of the world’s banknotes.

A spokesman said: ‘If these reports are true … we would be hugely disappointed and deeply concerned that this shows a serious lack of commitment to British business.

‘ We have a strong track record producing the UK passport for the last nine years by hundreds of our highly skilled staff in Gateshead, Manchester and Bath.’

Theresa May described the return of blue passports as an expression of ‘independence and sovereignty’.