On 15 August 1988, the Glasgow passport office was the first to start producing new burgundy-coloured machine-readable UK passports.
The International Civil Aviation Organisation had first promoted this new international standard for passports, which involved attaching a machine-readable strip inside the back cover.
The strip can be read by a machine at passport control. The information on the strip can then be checked immediately against details held on immigration computers. This increases both international security and the speed with which people can pass through border controls.
All newly issued UK passports are now machine-readable.
The new burgundy passports had another key difference: they were the first UK passports to mention the European Community (EC) on the cover.
This was the result of a decision made by the Council of Ministers of the EC to introduce a common format for passports for member states. As well as mentioning the EC on the cover, the new format included translations of certain parts of the text inside the passport into official languages of the EC.
In 1997, the words 'European Community’ were replaced with ‘European Union’ (EU).
Despite these changes, the new passport was still a UK passport, not a European one. It retained the Royal Coat of Arms and the traditional wording about allowing the holder ‘free passage and protection’.
Not everyone who has a UK passport can claim a connection to the European Union. People belonging to the following groups are issued with a ‘lookalike’ burgundy machine-readable passport that has no references to the EC/EU:
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