No Support for British Expats in Thailand

The Consul in Chiang Mai, Thailand was recently closed. There is a sizable British community in and around Chiang Mai numbering thousands and we get no support. I recently renewed my son's passport and had to travel to Bangkok twice - once to apply for and once to collect it. It cost me £336.50 in air fares and hotel bills on top of the £72 for the passport itself and it can take up to 6 weeks. In contrast, my wife is Japanese; she applied at the local consulate and got a new passport in less than a week. In my capacity as a volunteer policeman I recently helped a German national whose passport was stolen. She had a replacement within 10 days.

I have written to my MP and was initially ignored, so I wrote to the Home Secretary about the costs involved in getting a new passport and the Foreign Secretary about the abysmal level of service abroad. Neither has replied, instead delegating a response to a member of the British Consulate in Bangkok. This lady has not answered ANY of the questions I asked and instead wrote a lot of gobbledegook tripe about how centralizing services was giving better services. It is, of course, rubbish and the key points: cost and inconvenience were not even mentioned.