Immigration Dept. Explains Increase in Fees for Passport Services
On April first, the Immigration Department introduced new fees for passport services, several months after the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Foreign Trade and Immigration announced in parliament that charges would not be increased along with the introduction of a new Belize e-passport. Nonetheless, it has become necessary in order to offset the cost of the modern travel document. Applicants are now required to pay anywhere between one hundred to three hundred dollars, depending on the service being requested. Of note is that the number of passport applications increased by two hundred percent last year, to a total of forty-eight thousand, ninety-two applications. Those were a combination of machine readable and e-passport applications. The implementation of the recent changes have been met with strong criticism from the public, notwithstanding government‘s rationale for the increased fees. Earlier today, News Five spoke by phone with Doctor Gilroy Middleton, Chief Executive Officer in the Ministry of Immigration. For context, however, we begin with a short clip from Senator Eamon Courtenay, Minister of Immigration.
Eamon Courtenay
Eamon Courtenay, Senator for Government Business
“We’ve been getting a lot of questions. It is not the intention of the government to change the fees for applications, renewals, et cetera, of the passports, the new passports at this time. People have been asking because it was put to Cabinet that we should increase the fees. That is not the intention of the government at this time. I just want to clarify that for public consumption.”
On the phone: Dr. Gilroy Middleton
On the phone: Dr. Gilroy Middleton, CEO, Ministry of Immigration
“Okay, so the changes came into effect on April first, and in terms of the cost, basically the changes are a reflection of the break-even cost to produce these documents and it must be noted that these fees were scheduled to be implemented in October 2022 when the new e-passport and the new e-pics system was introduced. However, the cabinet had informed that they will have the old fees which represents a passport that at that time was seventeen years old. So cabinet approved that the old, seventeen-year-old fees be maintained, however, at this time, it is, we can hold off no longer. We need to implement these new fees six months into the new passport system.”
