This is a good development in relation to the petition we are all pushing to have changed based on the extortion of immigrants by the Home office.
In a landmark judgment the high court has found that the Home Office’s £1,012 child citizenship fee is unlawful. The fee has been described as “shameless profiteering” by Amnesty International.
The current fee affect tens of thousands of children in the UK. The Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens, which brought the case, along with two children affected by the high fees, estimates there to be about 120,000 children in the UK without British citizenship, approximately 65,000 of whom were born here. In 2018, more than 40,000 children applied to be registered as British citizens.
According to the Home Office, the cost of processing a child citizenship application is just £372 so the department makes a profit of £640 on the registration of each child. This surplus is used to fund other parts of the Home Office’s immigration work.
The families of many children who have the right to be registered as British citizens, having been born in the UK and lived here for their first 10 years of their lives, simply cannot afford the high cost of registration, so thousands are condemned to live in limbo.
The court found a “mass of evidence” showing that the fee prevented many children from registering for British citizenship, leaving them feeling “alienated, excluded, ‘second-best’, insecure and not fully assimilated into the culture and social fabric of the UK”.
The judgment requires the Home Office to reconsider the fee and ensure that children’s best interests are taken fully into account in doing so. The court has made clear that where a child has a right to British citizenship it will generally be in the child’s best interests to be registered as British.
The case, challenging the lawfulness of the profit element of the Home Office’s £1,012 fee for a child to register as a British citizen and the lawfulness of charging a fee where a child cannot afford to pay it, was heard by Mr Justice Jay in the high court last month.
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