In New Zealand and elsewhere, some dual UK citizens have spent hundreds of dollars to get new British passports.
Photo: RNZ / Gill Bonnett
Some British dual nationals are getting permanent exemptions from needing UK passports to travel there – but the carve-out is not going to help those in New Zealand.
A low-key change has allowed EU nationals granted British citizenship after Brexit to circumvent the new border requirements.
In New Zealand and elsewhere, some dual UK citizens have spent hundreds of dollars to get new British passports, trying to avoid writing off thousands more they have spent on pre-booked holidays.
The border requirement – which means British and Irish citizens can no longer use their New Zealand passport to enter the UK – came into force a month ago.
The policy, first revealed by RNZ in mid-January, caused panic for travellers unaware of the move.
Advocacy groups and immigration lawyers in the UK have since called on the government to rethink several aspects of its programme.
They only discovered the new passport exemption for European dual nationals given settlement status in Britain after Brexit through Home Office correspondence about the ongoing saga two weeks ago.
The British government website now sets out how citizens of EU and other European countries such as Switzerland will not need a UK passport to travel there.
UK lobby group the3million – named after the EU migrants living and voting there – said it welcomed the government’s partial u-turn, but said it still left many others struggling to navigate citizenship and passport complexities.
“It’s for a very precise group – it’s for those EU/EEA/Swiss citizens and their family members who were living in the UK and applied for status under the EU Settlement Scheme,” its spokeswoman Monique Hawkins told RNZ.
“This is the cohort that can benefit from this new concession.”
The group wants the UK government to go much further in changing the passport requirements and allowing a grace period for people who have not yet got a UK passport, or did not know they needed one.
“As the world moves towards digital travel documentation, we do not see that dual citizens should be forced to maintain two sets of expensive physical documents if they do not want to do so.”
Hawkins also took aim at the digital Certificate of Entitlement (CoE), which is an alternative – albeit ‘extremely expensive’ – to keeping a second passport.
“We are fully aware that these no longer need to be renewed; however, £589 [NZ$1347] is still more than six times the cost of an adult British passport, each of which lasts for 10 years,” said a joint letter to the Home Office.
“It would therefore take more than 60 years before the cost of a CoE outweighs the cost of passport renewals, and for a family the multiplied cost is likely to be unaffordable.”
The letter also points out that some European dual nationals will now not even need a passport to enter the UK, but only a national ID card from their country of origin.
“Although this was not one of the measures we had asked for in our letter, we welcome this change for the cohort who can benefit from it. We note it is a significant departure from the general Home Office position that for a British citizen there is “a legal requirement to hold a valid British passport or Certificate of Entitlement” as stated in the Home Office response to our letter.”
Meanwhile, dual nationals in New Zealand are still struggling with the changes, as well as flight cancellations and uncertainty thrown up by the Middle East conflict.
Travel agents and some airlines have been updating passengers, but others remain unaware of the change or even that they or their children could be British citizens by descent.
Some are against the clock to access ID documents for citizenship and passport applications, waiting on deliveries, or have decided they will be relinquishing their UK citizenship altogether.
A New Zealander told RNZ he was lucky to see news about the rule change before his daughter, who was studying in the UK, took a trip to the Continent – as she would not have been able to return to Britain afterwards.
Previously, dual citizens had been able to visit the UK on a New Zealand passport, more recently with an ETA, an electronic online declaration costing about $37.
The UK’s Guardian newspaper has reported cases of dual national Britons, including teenagers, stuck overseas after going on holiday to Europe or elsewhere and then discovering they need a UK passport to return.
RNZ has heard from people planning to try to travel without a British passport, hoping that check-in and border staff will not know they or their children have dual citizenship.
The UK Home Office and British High Commission have previously warned against that, and suggested people could use expired passports as a temporary measure if airlines agree, while defending their communication of the changes.
* The full rules around citizenship can be found here https://www.gov.uk/check-british-citizenship and a rundown of the passport requirements are here https://www.gov.uk/apply-first-adult-passport , including information for those who had names changed by marriage, or last had a UK passport issued before 1994.
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