Passport and national identity card: new measures to reduce issuing times

500 new ticket offices will be settled across France to increase appointment slots in town halls and reduce the time it takes to issue identity cards and passports.

The Minister responsible for local and regional authorities has also announced that municipalities which receive applications for identity documents will receive an additional €20 million. The aid, which can go up to €21,000 per collection device, covers “75% of the cost of an assigned staff member” in the service, the minister said.

May 2022 Emergency Plan to Reduce Delays

Issuing identity documents is an essential service for citizens. That is why, in the face of excessive delays, a system was deployed in May 2022 in town halls and in France services points to enable an additional 50,000 requests per week to be processed. An additional 620 collection devices had already been deployed.

The more systematic use of online pre-application on the website of the National Agency for Secure Titles facilitates the work of agents in town halls and considerably reduces the time users spend on finalizing their file. At the same time, the Ministry of the Interior has increased the number of staff responsible for examining cases in the prefecture, the last stage of the procedure, by 30%.

Since the end of 2021, applications for renewal of identity documents have increased at an unprecedented rate, with a large number of French citizens taking steps to recover from the COVID-19 crisis. This increase was even more pronounced during the summer and end-of-school exams, bringing the wait time for appointments to 65 days on average (up from 11.5 days in April 2021). In some departments, wait times could exceed 100 days. The emergency plan has made it possible to “reduce the time taken to book appointments in town hall from 90 to 50 days on average”, according to the Minister Delegate for Local and Regional Authorities.