Applications for British passports made after January 1, 2009 should be sent to the new Switzerland-Benelux-France Passport Service in Paris by post or courier, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office said on its 'UK in Switzerland' website. The changes are part of global measures to cut administration costs and "rationalise passport services" according to an FCO circular.

Similar services in Belgium, the Netherlands and were recently merged with those for France, while those for Portugal were moved to Spain in 2007. Passport services for British nationals living in Canada are also being merged with those in the United States at the end of this year.

As a result, the British consulate in Geneva, which processed about 6,000 to 8,000 applications a year, will no longer handle passport requests for Switzerland. Arrangements for emergency travel documents will be divided between the seven or eight consuls or honorary consuls around the country, but these are normally only valid for a one-way trip back to Britain.

Frequent travellers - including cross-border commuters in the Geneva or other Swiss frontier regions - who need a new passport are being advised to "apply at a time when you are not travelling for a while", up to nine months before their passport expires.

The passport service is still promising to fulfill 90 percent of requests within ten working days, compared to the three week return service promised in Britain. However, that would inevitably include at least one weekend and does not include transit time by post between Switzerland and France; the process is unlikely to last less than two weeks.

When quizzed about immigration checks at British ports and airports, the British Consul-General, Sue Kinoshita, acknowledged that travel back to Britain during that period might be problematic. "No, I wouldn't recommend it," she told Swisster, advising British residents abroad to defer their travel plans. "You do need to plan ahead a little bit."

On December 12, passport controls at Switzerland's borders will be abolished when its membership of the European Union's Schengen policing agreement comes into force. However, foreign nationals and citizens in France, Germany and Switzerland are normally required to carry an identity document on them. Britain does not issue identity cards to its nationals, leaving them with little choice but to rely on their passport, and a Swiss residence permit carries little official weight across the border.

"What we would suggest they would do is to keep ID on them - their resident's permit or driving licence, for example - and also a copy of their old passport. I'm quite sure that would be acceptable," Kinoshita said. "People who used to make postal applications will barely notice the difference."

British residents abroad pay a fee of 158 euros for a passport  compared to 72 pounds (85 euros) for UK residents. From next year people living in Switzerland will have to foot additional charges for delivery, including 21 euros for the return by courier.

Kinoshita said the changes were also motivated by the switch to biometric passports, which require more costly technical equipment to produce. At the moment, that is limited to facial or eye characteristics derived from the photograph, but the Consul-General did not rule out that passport services could be centralised in Britain in the future when even more complex passports incorporating features like fingerprint scans become the norm.

The consulate in Geneva will lose some staff with the removal of the passport section, Kinoshita said.

More information on British passport applications is available on the official 'UK in Switzerland' website