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Presumably the MyCSP staff believe their jobs to be safe and their employment contracts will transfer to Capita. If they're on strike I wonder whether Capita will feel obliged to take them on. It was quite amusing when the Home Office changed the Immmigration Detention and Escorting contracts From Group4 to Wackemhut or somebody else but it was always the same staff who turned up in a different uniform.

My wife faced the same problem a few years ago when renewing her UK passport. Rather arrogantly. HMPO states that the name on the foreign passport should be changed to match the UK one. However, since retiring to Thailand nearly 16 years ago she no longer had a UK bank account or very much else tying her to the UK and it would have been a real pain to change all her Thai identity, so we changed her UK name by deed-poll to her Thai name and submitted that with the application, which was accepted without question. I also notified the DWP about the name change, and she has been drawing the State Pension since last year. The deed-poll application was all done online and fairly quick and easy. I can't remember much of the detail, there was a topic about this at the time. But the last time I looked at the passport application form I didn't see the stipulation about matching names which was there when my wife applied. Is it still a requirement?

I had the same problem with the address length a few years back, and like you I had to get them to compress it into fewer lines. Receiving mail from them is still a bit hit-and-miss, but that is really due to the vagaries of the Thai Post Office. I didn't get the "Declaration of Entitlement" (same as the DWP's Life Certificate) in the post until late June, but I'd already heard about it and got them to email me one. I got locked out of my account back in March, when the app used for 2-factor i/d didn't work any more. I didn't get any response to an email asking for help, and ended up submitting a written complaint (sorry, I can't remember to whom or which department I addressed it). I got an email after a few weeks advising that my account had been re-set so I was able to log back on, set a new password and the only option for 2-factor i/d was SMS, which worked fine. I've just logged on again now to make sure. Like other posters, I'm not optimistic that a transfer to Capita will be beneficial. Edit: I've now found the letter which was simply addressed to Complaints Department, MyCSP, PO Box 2017 Liverpool L69 2BU. It reminds me that in addition to emailing them unsuccessfully I tried phoning them, the switchboard transferred me to the "Portals Team" but after waiting for 20 minutes for them to answer I gave up. Not impressive, but at least the letter did the trick.

I'm sure that is the case, however, they don't seem to have caught up with me. In the months my property was empty my son went in every so often (a condition of the empty property insurance I took out) and he told me there was something from the council addressed to "the occupier". As the house was not occupied he left it there! I was a little concerned, and looked on the council website, but there was no box I could tick to register that covered my particular circumstances, so I just left it. I assumed that if the council went after the buyer for the missing period there would be comeback via the solicitors. 6 months later I've heard nothing.

I guess you can do it all remotely. When I put my house up for sale last September as the tenants left I chose to go back, get the keys from the agents (who I didn't want to employ for the sale), then dealing with estate agents and solicitors face to face was very easy. After that, everything was no problem to deal with online. I originally bought the house in 1999 and lived in it for 10 years until I retired to Thailand, then rented it out. I never had any problems with tenants, and the last ones left the place spic and span, bless them. The oppressive new legislation was certainly a factor in the decision to sell, but the main reason was that I am now 80 and wanted to save my son and daughter the bother of disposing of it when I die. The agents quickly found a buyer at an acceptable price (a bit below alleged market value) and the sale went through ok. CGT paid on the gain since 2015, I had a valuation done at the time. I already had an account in Guernsey and the interest on the proceeds isn't so much less than the net rental income after paying the fees to the agents and their maintenance contractors whose charges had become quite rapacious in recent years. The interest rates have come down a bit but I wouldn't be surprised to see them rising again before long as the government has lost control of its borrowing requirement.

Thanks, chaps.

I have a bench drill which I didn't use for many years, and was stored outside under cover. It now generates insufficient power to drive the belt, although I can get the motor to run by manually spinning the pulley on the shaft. I haven't looked inside the casing of the motor, but it runs quite freely under no load. I saw an internet video which suggested that the capacitor is at fault. I took that off, and the motor still starts by hand and runs, so I will try a new capacitor. It is a type CBB60 SH, 6.5uF (+/- 5% Class B, if that is relevant) 450V AC 50/60Hz. I see on Lazada a lot of capacitors for fans, some rated at 6uF and 8uF. There are also some designated CBB60, seem to be for washing machines and the like. The nearest on offer is 6.3uF, then 8uF. My two questions are:- 1) Will the 6.3uF work ok? 2) Is there any advantage or danger to fitting 8uF? I have a very feeble grasp of matters electric, so simple explanations would be appreciated.

Some countries, the USA and UK to name but two, don't have a "national carrier" as such. Perhaps the more relevant criterion is that it should be a direct flight, which would in many cases rule out a low cost airline.

Nothing new about this. I remember being recommended to gargle with salt water over 60 years ago to reduce my susceptibility to nose and throat infections.

Indeed, walking up 2nd Road from the Royal Garden Plaza is a shop where I bought a cheap carry-on case.

That's what you get from unedited press releases. According to Wikipedia "Founded in 1862, it is China's oldest automobile maker.[4][5] It is currently the smallest of the "Big Four" state-owned car manufacturers of China..." I wonder what the 1862 model looked like.

Sorry, that's not quite correct. Black Rod is sent from the House of Lords to summon the Members of the House of Commons to the Lords. As he approaches the Commons the door is slammed shut, and he (or she, as the present incumbent is female) knocks three times for it to be opened, so that the summons can be issued. Just a symbol of the traditional independence of the Commons from the Monarchy.

On this document - 9303_p3_cons_en.pdf (icao.int) - the International Civil Aviation Organisation, which sets the agreed standard for travel documents says this:- "Unknown date of birth. Where a date of birth is completely unknown, that data element shall appear in the date format used for dates of birth by the issuing State or organization but with Xs representing unknown elements (numbers and/or letters) of the date. Examples: XXnXXnXX XXnXXnXXXX XXnXXXnXX where n = a single blank space or a period (if numerical format is used). If only part of the date of birth is unknown, only that part (day, month, year) of the date shall be represented by Xs as per the date format used by the issuing State or organization." So your wife can be issued with a passport which caters for her incomplete dob, and should be issued with a visa unless there are other perceived issues. Without wishing to disparage your wife in any way, I do recall as an enforcement officer dealing occasionally with Thai illegals arrested by the police in massage parlours, who came up with a story of having been facilitated to the UK by a "boyfriend" with whom they were no longer in contact. It is quite possible that the IOs in Oz 20 years ago thought she was on that game. I doubt very much that as your wife of many years she will have that problem again.

What i/d? Foreign travel requires a passport. I'm searching my memory of 20 years as an Immigration Officer and can't recall seeing passports showing a year of birth only, though I may be wrong. In these days of machine-readable and digitized passports I suspect the systems would be unable to cope with an incomplete date of birth, and it is quite likely that in the absence of day and month, a passport will show these as 01 01, as certainly used to happen on refugee documents. I suggest that you trot along to your nearest Passport Issuing Office and see what the score is - far more reliable than any answer you're likely to get on here.

If it wasn't for Netflix I wouldn't have seen 'Breaking Bad', arguably the best tv series made in decades. A more up-to-date series that I've found worth watching is 'Designated Survivor'.