If your passport has expired and you had planned to go on vacation abroad this summer, you will need to find a plan B in France. Like the situation at the national level, in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais, the appointments to file a request for renewal of title are long overdue. Very long term.
Last week, the Minister of the Interior, Gérald Darmanin, announced the allocation of additional resources to try to reduce the delay in the processing of requests for renewal of passports and identity cards. Certainly, we did not expect an immediate effect, however, the medium term, in other words this summer, also seems compromised. To get an idea of how long it will take to get an appointment to submit a passport application file, 20 minutes contacted several dozen town halls in the Nord and Pas-de-Calais. The results are clear: no time slot is available before July. The closest date that has been proposed to us still brings us to July 7 in the town hall of Fourmies. The farthest, August 23, in Tourcoing or Dunkirk.
Material means are not enough
Files are filed exclusively in town halls equipped with biometric data collection devices, which is far from being the case for the 35,000 municipalities in the territory. But as it is possible to submit your file elsewhere than in the town hall of your home, the small towns are taken by storm by the inhabitants of the big cities, according to several testimonies of civil servants. Part of the means put in place by the State consists in allocating additional biometric data collection equipment to cities already equipped, about twenty in the North for example. However, this gesture will only be effective if the town hall concerned allocates additional human resources to this task.
The Nord prefecture has also confirmed to 20 minutes that three municipalities that did not have biometric data collection equipment had recently been equipped with it. Checked, this is indeed the case. Except that the three town halls concerned, Marchiennes, Gouzeaucourt and Pecquencourt, can only be operational after having trained their staff, in other words, not before several weeks.
If it takes two months to file your file, you have to add two more for the file to be processed and for the title to be produced. On this side, the town halls can do nothing since it is the role of the centers of expertise and title resources (CERT). For the Nord and Pas-de-Calais, it is that of Arras which is competent. “The Ministry of the Interior has actually allocated a reinforcement of staff to the CERT of Arras in order to cope with the increase in requests for passports and identity cards observed”, confirms the prefecture of Pas-de-Calais to 20 minutes, adding that volunteer agents can also come to work “on Saturday mornings, overtime”. Will this allow your new passport to arrive before the summer break?