British passport renewal

My passport expires early next year so I need to apply for a new one. I'm a UK citizen living in Japan on a working visa.

I've read in other threads that when I have the new passport, I would need to go to immigration with the old passport to get the visa stamps transferred to the new passport.

Passport renewal for Brits is handled by the Hong Kong office, and their website says I should send my current passport as part of the application but doesn't say anything about getting the old one back. Maybe I missed something, can anyone give me any pointers?

If anyone has been through this process I'd be interested to know how long it took.

The period of renewal in HK depends on the duration on background check returns from UK Home Office.

Advisable to have copies of all pages of old passport before mailing.

Hi there,

I'm Belgian and in the same situation (needing passport renewal soon). I also heard that it was required to transfer immigration stamps to the new passport.

However after checking with immigration this turned out to be false. You just need to keep the old passport. Next time you renew your period of stay you just take the old passport and new passport with you to the immigration office.

The visa stamps are not transferable to the new passport since stamps were issued from a foreign authority not Home Office.

In one of my applications, I notified pp renewal that I have a valid visa on my pp. When pp is returned, on one of the pages they made a note that previous pp has a valid visa and I received new and old passports permanently glued together.

Visa's being issued now are included with Residence Card - so no need to worry about the passport anymore.

Thanks everyone for the answers. I got my current 3-year visa before the changes to the registration system so I assume mine will follow the same process as Donaldl's application.

I've finally done this and received my new passport from the UK and had my old one returned from Hong Kong with my visa in it.

I have an alien registration card, not the new residence card. Alien registration cards have the passport number displayed, but apparently residence cards do not as far as I know. So - do I need to have my ARC updated? Or as the system has changed do I need to apply for the new style residence card?