OJAS

Agreed. While all the rage 20 years or so ago, the concept of "joined-up government" - which IMHO would be a fundamental prerequisite to any systemic integration across Whitehall - is now completely dead in the water, As a result, each component part of the "great" UK government machine is, these days, required to confine its operations to issues which fall strictly within the purview of its particular silo, with blinkers firmly attached so as to avoid any "undesirable" external sideways glances.

Same here, but I suppose that it all depends on the particular immigration office in question. I gather from various reports on here that obtaining a re-entry permit at Chaengwattana, for instance, can be quite a tortuous process!

Can he not check in online before setting off to the airport or even (as I have done on a few occasions) at a self-service kiosk there if he arrives more than 3 hours early? In my experience it has subsequently proved possible to drop off baggage for the aircraft hold up to 5 hours before the scheduled flight departure time, and this should provide him with more than adequate breathing space for clearing Security and then obtaining a re-entry permit prior to clearing Immigration.

Whoever completed the TM30 form which has presumably been filed with Immigration in this instance, I would have thought.

And the slight inconvenience resulting from an extra trip to Immigration should, of course, be more than offset by the considerably greater inconvenience you would otherwise have been faced with when next renewing your British passport (assuming, of course, that renewing NZ passports is not a similarly tedious, protracted and cumbersomely bureaucratic process)!????

Looks like one of the first things the OP will need to do upon his return to Thailand with a visa exemption stamp (assuming that he has not obtained a re-entry permit) will be to leg it down to his local immigration office clutching an application for a non-o visa conversion - provided, of course, that he can meet all relevant requirements: https://www.immigration.go.th/en/?page_id=2537

IMHO the blame for this would be more appropriately laid at the door of the unnamed pal whom the BIB quizzed about the guy's behaviour rather than the TPN. The article includes a disclaimer stating that this particular individual was expressing a personal opinion and not providing a licensed medical diagnosis.

But I do just wonder whether the member of the UK Border Force who advised you to renew your passport because your picture was not representative of your current facial look would now be of that particular opinion as a result of the stresses and strains which you subsequently had to endure in getting your new passport!????

Quite likely I do!

So a couple of days less than the 11 weeks being officially advised then. That said, though, front-line civil servants have now voted to strike, which looks like having an adverse impact on processing times, so I'm not holding my breath that my new passport, applied for on 18 Oct, will be available for collection this side of 1 Jan 2023. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2022/nov/10/uk-civil-servants-whitehall-frontline-services-vote-strike

In any event, in the case of applications submitted in person, the VFS clerk with whom you interract on a 1-to-1 basis would presumably do rather more than raise an eyebrow by less than a millimetre if the individual sat in front of them bore little resemblance facially to any uncountersigned mug shots provided!

According to Laura Kuenssberg at the BBC, it is rumoured that personal allowance and higher rate threshold freezes could last until 2028: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-63599465 As regards scrapping the personal allowance for expats, this was the subject of a consultation exercise following the 2014 Budget, as a result of which this proposal was, thankfully for us, booted into the long grass on that particular occasion: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/restricting-non-residents-entitlement-to-the-uk-personal-allowance So while I would have thought it highly unlikely that the scrapping of the personal allowance for UK tax non-residents from the get-go will be announced as part of Thursday's Autumn Statement, I strongly suspect that we could find ourselves ruling out at our peril the possibility of Jeremy Hunt using this opportunity, just as George Osborn did in 2014, to launch a further consultation exercise on this doomsday scenario.

But no thanks to the lord that he is my UK MP (I am registered as an overseas voter in his constituency)! His enthusiasm for the additional monthly £300 payments to which you referred is in stark contrast to his apparent "couldn't care less" attitude on frozen State Pensions, for instance, judging from the complete walls of silence which I have met from him on both this and, for that matter, all other issues which I have raised with him over the years as a disgruntled constituent, both when living in the UK and subsequently after moving to Thailand!

And might these "strict requirements" include the provision of well-stuffed brown envelopes??

So all those amphurs who place roadblocks in the way of obtaining yellow books are bosum pals of yours, then, are they, as they provide you with a golden opportunity to gleefully slag off the likes of myself and @nigelforbes on here in a sneeringly patronisingly sarcastically arrogant manner?

@DrJack54 - I suggest that you specifically ask your airline to provide you with wheelchair assistance to guide you through the various stages between your arrival at the airport and boarding your flight. That's what I did for my latest European trip a few months back on account of my disability, and I can confirm that what @internationalism has said 100% reflected my experience on that occasion.

Yes, bearing in mind that you could have gone up to 45 days before the expiry date in the case of Chaengwattana (and up to 30 days beforehand in the cases of Samut Prakan and Nonthaburi).

Apart from those seeking permanent residency and/or Thai citizenship - for which the yellow book is, I gather, a prerequisite - I really don't think that this particular document is worth bothering about.

Hear, hear! As part of an unsuccessful attempt to obtain a yellow book several years ago, I was given the dreaded "Bangkok Runaround" by my local amphur which entailed me obtaining some document in person from the British Embassy, followed by traipsing out to the MFA offices to get this document translated into Thai and then verified - only to fall at the final fence when I took the verified translation back to my amphur only for some eagle-eyed official there to spot that the Thai transliteration of my surname didn't exactly match my wife's as stated in her ID card and blue tabien bahn. At that point I simply threw in the towel and haven't needed to look back ever since. In any event, a fundamental difficulty I have with the yellow book is that it omits what is IMHO the single-most important and relevant piece of personal information in our case - namely the date when our current permission to stay in Thailand is due to expire.

Yep, definitely any time on the basis of my personal experience. Maybe dependent on the size of transfers? The transfers which were processed instantly in my experience each yielded around 44k THB. And possibly also on the Wise transfer reason selected (I opted for "General Living Expenses" rather than "Funds For Long-Stay In Thailand")?

Who are "they" who have your passport, for how long have they had it, and why are they hanging on to it? IMHO it is foolish to let your passport out of your sight for an extended period of time in view of all the hassle involved in replacing it if whoever is holding it then goes on to lose it for you!

What I personally take strong exception to is HMPO's directive requiring those of us who don't live anywhere near Chiang Mai to submit ourselves to the masochistic "delights" of a cumbersome and bureaucratic passport renewal process entailing 2 trips in person to a dilapidated tower block in Bangkok with inconvenient conveniences which has consistently won The Silliest Office Building Name Of The Year award for each year since it was built way back when; or to fork out an extra 5,000 THB for an agent to make these trips on our behalf!!

At this rate of decline, the possibility will also eventually arise of our not receiving our new passports before their expiry dates! Now that the rush for new passports back in the UK in time for summer holidays for the first time in 3 years should now be behind us, it is not, I think, unreasonable to be expecting the timescales for processing renewal applications to be now falling. But if anything they are going the other way if 16 weeks, as mentioned by the OP, is now the accepted norm as far as HMPO are concerned! What on earth are those masters of bungling incompetence and ineptitude in that particular organisation up to during their working hours these days, I wonder?? In serious training for a new UK Government Inter-Departmental Thumb Twiddling Competition, maybe??

So precisely what do you mean by "retirement visa"? Are you referring to an annual extension of stay for retirement? Or might you, in fact, be referring to the conversion of a tourist visa or visa-exempt entry to a real genuine McCoy non-immigrant visa of the "O" variety for retirement at your local immigration office? Proof of the foreign origin of the 800k in question in the form of a Wise statement, bank document or whatever is only needed in the case of the latter, not the former!

Given that the 90-day medical extensions which were issued outside Bangkok did not prove problematical in the context of her retirement extension applications at Chaengwattana Immigration in December 2020 and December 2021, I would have thought it highly unlikely that they will prove problematical for her next retirement extension application there next month. IMHO your pal should ditch the agent in question and save 45,000 THB by processing the necessary paperwork for her next retirement extension application herself. Based on my experience of having successfully applied for 12 retirement extensions to date completely off my own bat without any agency assistance whatsoever, I can assure her that the whole process really isn't rocket science! IMHO the use of agents is only justified for the really complicated things in life like applying for a visa to enable your Thai partner to accompany you on a trip back to your home country or (in the case of Brits) renewing your passport from Thailand.