Face-to-face interviews with passport applicants will help fight fraud, officials have insisted amid claims that the checks posed a "major threat" to individual security.
Anyone requesting a passport for the first time will be interrogated on personal details under new rules coming into effect from April this year.
Critics claim the policy is over the top and a back-door means to gather data for use with the Government's controversial identity card scheme.
But the head of the Identity and Passport Office said the system was a necessary "inconvenience" that would stop criminals stealing people's identities.
And the Home Office said it would provide a "powerful weapon in the fight against passport fraud".
IPS chief executive James Hall told the BBC: "We all as citizens recognise that we have to be inconvenienced by airport security but it's in our collective benefit that we are.
"So I think people will recognise that it's appropriate once in their lifetime to go through a little bit more inconvenience in order that we can ensure the integrity of the passport document."
The questions were "not particularly intrusive", he said, but had to be details no-one but the genuine applicant was likely to know.
"We might ask the applicant if they had a mortgage and if so with which company".
All new applicants, some 600,000 a year, will face the new procedure and from 2009 millions more will be interviewed when it is extended to those renewing lost, stolen or expired passports.
