The UK’s new rules on compulsory British passports for dual nationals – including children born to Brits abroad – continue to cause confusion and stress. One dad told The Local how he has been forced to cancel a trip to the UK to see relatives.
Darren Hayes, based near Toulouse in the south-west, has lived in France with his French wife for 15 years and has two children – one born in the UK, the other born in France.
His children, now 15 and 13, previously had both British and French passports, but eventually the couple let their UK passports lapse “because it’s half the price to renew the French ones”, says Darren.
The children travelled on their French passports or French ID cards for many years without issue, including a trip to the UK last summer.
But they have now fallen foul of the UK’s new ETA requirements, which insist that all dual nationals travel into the UK using their UK passport – including the children of Brits living abroad who, in many cases, have never had a UK passport.
Poor communication from the UK government to dual nationals means that many only found out, via media coverage, once the new requirements were already in place.
Darren was one of those, and has now been forced to cancel their upcoming trip to the UK because the children’s new passports have not arrived in time, losing almost €500 on flights for the whole family.
To add to the problem, he said the UK government demanded extra documents such as certified translations of birth certificates that are normally only required for first-time passport applications.
He said: “I first saw this requirement a few weeks ago on the BBC, I know the UK government says that it has been well publicised but I didn’t see it anywhere.
“Our flights were already booked so I sent off to get the children’s passports renewed, first they said they hadn’t received my documents, even though the tracker showed that they had, and then they said that they need the children’s birth certificates, with a certified translation for my son who was born in France, plus a certificate of parental responsibility and then we had to send in their French passports.
“I don’t understand why they need all this as both of them previously had UK passports.
“We paid for a certified translation of the birth certificate and sent that off, but there’s no chance of it being back in time so we had to cancel the trip – we don’t go back very often but the children were looking forward to visiting grandma.
“When I first got my French-born son a passport it was 2012 and there was no certified translation required, but apparently since 2021 all documents need to be translated – which seems a bit strange as all UK passports have the information in both English and French.
“I’ve spent the last 15 years complaining about French bureaucracy but now it seems that British bureaucracy is even worse. My French wife is laughing at me.”
He is far from the only one to be facing problems caused by the new rules, with some British-based dual national teenagers stranded abroad after they were refused re-entry to the UK due to not having a UK passport.
A British schoolgirl was left in Denmark because she was not allowed to board her Norwegian Air flight back to the UK on March 8th following a weekend visiting her father, a British academic working at a university in Copenhagen.
The following week a 19-year-old ended up stuck in Madrid on a university trip, while an 18-year-old British-Danish national was stranded in Mumbai.
The UK government insists that the changes have been publicised, saying: “Public information advising dual nationals to travel with a valid UK passport or certificate of entitlement has been available since October 2024, including official guidance on gov.uk”.
Until the start of 2026 the information could only be found in a ‘factsheet’ buried deep on the Gov.uk website – the wording of which changed several times over the past two years – and on the Facebook pages of some British Embassies.
It was also not made clear that this would apply to the children of Brits living abroad – in many cases these children had never had a UK passport and regarded themselves as a citizen of the country of their birth.
Most British dual nationals found out about the changes from media coverage, and are now scrambling to get the necessary passport – or pay £500 for a Certificate of Entitlement.
Following media coverage of problems for dual nationals, the UK government has said that expired UK passports may be accepted – but this remains at the discretion of the airlines.
By contrast people who have only nationality of an EU country can complete the simple online process for an ETA and pay €19.
