Yes and in the British system names can be fluid, changed at will with no declarations being made. That’s how my mother was able to register my birth with the surname of her mother’s third (!) marriage. Birth certificates are also immutable in certain ways but not entirely everything on it is immutable.

Not to mention the passport office has forgotten previous decisions for my own passport where this sort of surname discrepancy has been explained away. (Including one passport where I am listed on a page of her passport!)

The NPCs are infuriating. I called, emailed and received a different answer every time. It was like a poor LLM.

After applying I had to explain to my mother that within the same batch of applications, one daughter required additional UK documents but the other one didn’t (the passport came), purely because one was born in the UK and the other one wasn’t. She rightly flipped out, raised it with an MP and it was resolved within a day.