Why did I have to fly from London to Belfast to get a new UK passport?

theguardian.com:

D iscovering you urgently need a new passport during a lengthy Passport Office strike is bad news. Normally you can apply for a fast-track passport that can be collected within a week, or use the online premium service that can turn one around for you in a couple of days, but not when a quarter of Passport Office staff stop working for five weeks.

For me, the consequence of this was discovering I would have to take a flight from London, where I live, to Belfast to pick up my new passport. There were no appointments in England. And even though I was paying top dollar (£193.50 compared with £155 for fast-track or £82.50 for the normal service), the soonest in-person appointment I could get was 19 days later, on Tuesday 25 April. With work trips to Dubai and then Nice in the next couple of weeks, getting my new passport was a matter of urgency.

This stressful experience began with an even more stressful one on 4 April, when I turned up at Gatwick airport with my four-year-old daughter to fly to France to visit her grandparents. We had got all the way to the gate when a member of easyJet staff scanned my passport and the screen flashed up an “amber” alert. “You can’t fly – your passport has expired,” she told me. My heart sank, my daughter started crying. But I was also confused: the expiry date was clearly November 2023, and even with the EU requirement to have at least three months of validity on your passport, I thought I was fine. But no.

The mistake came from not checking the issue date. Since Brexit, to travel to the EU, British passports can be no older than 10 years, so if you have extra months added on from a passport issued before 2019 (I had nine extra months), these cease to be counted. Travel to other countries