A DECADE has flown by and yes, it’s time to renew my passport. But oh how things have changed since I last completed the forms and sent away my little counter-signed images.

For starters, when I searched online, I was instantly irritated by the presence of three sites on the subject taking up the top three search results on a major search engine.

These are companies which you might think are official bodies ‘assisting’ you with your application. And for their ‘assistance’, you will pay a mighty sum on top of what your passport should actually cost.

One of them is charging £162, double what it should be for passport renewal, when this service costs £72.50 through the official gov.uk channel, moving to a maximum of £81.25 if you use the check-and-send service.

Money talks – and money is what has put these other companies’ websites ahead of the official Government site containing the information you’re really looking for.

I was only hyper-aware of this situation because we were taken in by one such site a few years ago when obtaining our European health cards.

Our mistake was to take the first site we saw on trust, a site which looked, to all intents and purposes, like the ‘proper’ site.

And we paid for these cards – which are in fact free. I was absolutely furious when I found out, especially when the Internet search engine we used had not identified that these results were sponsored links for companies that make money from unaware citizens.

These days, things have changed, and these sites – including passport.uk. com, passportdirect.org.uk and passports-office.co.uk – must indicate that they are not affiliated with the Post Office or any Government body.

It is much easier to realise that the site you’re on is not the right one and, in addition, the major search engine on which they appear marks them as an ‘ad’ with a small orange square.

But you still might make the mistake when you read things like “welcome to the UK passport renewal assistance service”.

So, the message is, be warned. Things are not always what they seem.

All of this irritation comes, of course, before you’ve even dared to try to venture a decent photograph of yourself which is correct, an image in which “the image of you – from the crown of your head to your chin – must be between 29mm and 34mm high” and in which you’re adopting “a neutral expression” ensuring that your mouth is closed, and so on and so on.

I look utterly depressed in the shots which I’ll be sending away – and a little worried too. With all this hoo-hah to consider, is it any wonder?