UK tightens entry rules for dual nationals, British woman told to buy £589 entitlement certificate while passport renewal pending, Border control as paperwork cruelty

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Annie: ‘What the Home Office don’t understand is they are taking away this chance to be with my mum at the end of her life.’ Photograph: Annie theguardian.com

David Davis: ‘Dual British citizens are being treated as though they are foreign visitors to their own country.’ Photograph: House of Commons/PA theguardian.com

A British woman living in the Netherlands says new UK Home Office entry rules will prevent her from travelling to England to see her 91-year-old mother, who is in end-of-life care, because her British passport is currently with the authorities for renewal. The Guardian reports that the rules taking effect on Wednesday require most dual British nationals—any second nationality except Irish—to present a valid British passport to enter the UK, or pay £589 for a “certificate of entitlement” that can take up to eight weeks to obtain.

The woman, identified only as Annie, had assumed she could continue to travel on her Dutch passport while her British renewal was processed, as she has been visiting every couple of weeks. Her British passport expired last Friday and is already submitted as part of the renewal application. Under the new policy, that ordinary administrative gap becomes a hard border barrier: no UK passport, no boarding—unless she purchases an additional document whose processing time may outlast her mother.

Modern border control in a mature bureaucracy is not dramatic raids, but a system that converts citizenship into a document-management problem and then charges a premium to solve it. The Home Office’s “certificate of entitlement” is effectively a paid workaround for the state’s own processing delay. The price tag—£589—reads less like a cost-recovery fee than a deterrent designed to force compliance with a single-document rule.

Former Conservative cabinet minister David Davis, who is the MP for Annie’s mother, urged the government to introduce a grace period, calling the policy an unacceptable restriction on dual nationals’ “right of return,” according to the Guardian. The Liberal Democrats’ home affairs spokesperson Will Forster also called for transitional arrangements.

The Home Office rationale is not spelled out in the Guardian’s account, but the administrative logic is familiar: standardise entry checks, reduce ambiguity at the border, and minimise reliance on foreign documents for British citizens. Yet the costs of that “clarity” are dumped onto individuals precisely when they are least able to absorb them—during bereavement, family emergencies, or other time-sensitive travel.

The policy targets people who already did what the state claims to want: they complied with the post-Brexit reality by naturalising where they live, while remaining British. Annie says she never intended to become a dual national but did so after Brexit to preserve rights in the Netherlands.

A state that can’t renew a passport quickly but can instantly deny a citizen entry without the right paperwork is not defending sovereignty so much as defending process. The border becomes a call-centre script with armed backup, and “citizenship” becomes conditional on whether your documents are currently sitting in a government envelope.