As summer approaches, many French people are looking to make an appointment at the town hall. As the deadlines explode, the Ministry of the Interior announces new measures.
Frequent travelers know it, with the approach of the holidays it is always prudent to take a look at the validity date of your identity document, at the risk of a very big disillusion once you arrive at the airport. But this year, even the most far-sighted are going to have a bad surprise: the deadlines for getting an appointment have exploded. It takes an average of two months to submit a renewal request, compared to 15 days to three weeks usually. However, there are significant regional disparities. A situation caused by the unprecedented influx of requests.
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Noémie, a 20-year-old business school student, experienced this misadventure. Last week, she started looking for appointments to redo her passport so she could travel to Canada in August. “I did not find any slot in Lille before the end of July“, she explains. She decides to look in Anjou, where her parents live: “since it is less populated, I thought it would be easier to find“. Wasted effort “it was even longer“, she remembers. By chance, she takes a look at Paris. Luckily, two slots are available the next day. “Surely withdrawals because it was the only ones“, she points. If she considers herself lucky to have found this opportunity, she had to pay 40 euros, the price of the Lille-Paris round trip by TGV, to get there. A route to renew once the document is ready, to be able to pick it up.
In an attempt to reduce delays, the ANTS (National Agency for Secure Documents) has made unprecedented efforts. The workforce in the prefectures will thus be drastically increased. A 30% increase was announced by the general manager, Anne-Gaëlle Baudoin. In addition, 400 collection devices, equipment for registering an application for an identity card or passport, will be deployed in town halls. The goal: “a normal situation in the summer“, and “no one is prevented from going on vacation“, she explained this Friday morning on FranceInfo.
In an attempt to save time, the ANTS recommends giving priority to online pre-requests, on its website. The goal, to arrive with a file already prepared, which should make it possible to “halve meeting time“explains the general manager. Good news, once the application has been submitted, the instruction and production times are now close to a normal situation.
Post-covid catch-up
How often, this exceptional situation is the conjunction of several independent phenomena. First: containment. During the two years of the epidemic, many identity cards and passports expired without the owners trying to renew them. According to Anne-Gaëlle Baudoin, it would thus be 1.3 million titles which would not have been requested. A catch-up effect that happens all of a sudden with the holidays, the desire to leave and… the end-of-year exams, such as the patent or the baccalaureate. An identity document is indeed required to be able to participate. In this case, a valid document is not necessarily necessary, “IDs that are out of date or expired for less than five years are completely acceptable“, reassures Anne-Gaëlle Baudoin.
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Another aggravating circumstance: Brexit. Until the exit of the United Kingdom from Europe a simple identity card was enough to join the country. This is no longer the case today. A change that pushes up the demand for a passport. Finally, Anne-Gaëlle Baudoin highlights the attractiveness effect of the new identity card rolled out last year. All these events combined explain the skid.