Passport office wanting GREAT Grandmother’s birth certificate

[FunWithFlagz]

(edited by MNHQ at request of OP)
I’m trying to get a passport for my granddaughter. She lives with me permanently. I’ve had an email asking for MY mothers birth certificate because I was born after 01/01/1983 so my not automatically be a British citizen. My mum is abroad on an extended boomer retirement holiday and her house is 120 miles away. Sending off for a copy would take 15 working days and I fly in 4 weeks…

Has anyone heard of such batshittery before? I never had to send my mums birth certificate when I got my own kids passports!

AIBU to think that this is insane and this passport officer is clearly bonkers?

Never heard of this before. Hope you can get this all sorted out.

I don't even know where one of my great grandmothers was born.

Asking for the birth certificate of the relative born pre-1983 is correct, as many have said. The British Nationality Act came into force on 01/01/1983 so anyone born in the UK before that date was British by the principle of jus soli - 'by the right of the soil'. British simply for being born here.

After 01/01/1983, for a person born in the UK to be automatically British, they needed to have been born in the UK to a British parent or a parent with settled status.

What is highly likely to have happened is a lack of detail on how OPs passport was issued. They won't have the details of the pre-1983 relative, so they have asked for them. No-one is disputing anyone's citizenship, they are doing due diligence.

This used to be my bread-and-butter at one point in my career, so I understand it extremely well. I agree with a previous poster that it is fascinating. British nationality law is the most complex type of nationality law in the world.

Which doesn't help you, OP, and I understand it's a pain being asked to get the birth certificate! I don't see any other way around it though.

My mother has been a grandmother since her mid 30’s and not from her eldest child having children! By mid 50’s she had 5 grandchildren!

my grandmother is a great grandmother to 5 G grandchildren now but was in her late 50’s/early 60’s when she first became a great grandmother.

it not common but it’s not vanishingly rare depending on where you come from.

its rarer than the past and definitely will be in the future as more and more people are waiting until 30’s-40’s to begin having children

My mum is abroad on an extended boomer retirement holiday

It’s ridiculous having to send all that when you all have passports already (apart from your grandaughter). I had to send my DC, mine and my parents birth certificates which I thought was bad enough.

It also ends up costing a fortune paying for tracked delivery every time they ask for more.

Unless I’ve misunderstood what the passport office are trying to do here, there is so much about this that seems mad to me:

First off - That you have to apply to one bit of government to get a piece of paper to send off to another bit of government is itself annoying, costly and seems like a weakness in terms of vulnerability to forgery.

But more fundamentally - Having to use birth certificates to prove citizenship all the way back to someone born before 1983 when the people you are providing birth certificates for already have British passports and should have had to prove citizenship to get them.

Some posters seem to think because so few people at the moment won’t have a parent of grandparent born before 1983 it’s just an anomaly and not worth worrying about. But it won’t be that long before most children don’t have a grandparent that old.

Is the plan that from now on to get a passport (or to prove you are a citizen in any situation) you’re going to have to get hold of birth certificates for ancestors all the way back to pre-1983? In another few years some kids will have to go back to their great-great-grandparents, and then a couple of decades after that great-great-great-grandparent, etc.. That’s not a sensible long term mechanism and it’s something that quite a lot of people would have significant difficulty with. We need to be able to rely on our citizenship without having to trace our ancestors back to a particular, ever-receding year.

But that's your mother's parents so it's one generation up.

The OP is saying her granddaughter requires the OPs mother's detail so that's 3 generations!!!

Having to use birth certificates to prove citizenship all the way back to someone born before 1983 when the people you are providing birth certificates for already have British passports and should have had to prove citizenship to get them.

Indeed-it's hardly joined up thinking is it?

It's not ageist just to refer to someone as a boomer.
My parents are part of the boomer generation. There's nothing ageist in saying that.

Boomer itself isnt ageist, but It's irrelevant to the passport issue, and written together with the " extended holiday " comment , in my view , is ageist.

I disagree. There's a tendency on MN recently to claim that any mention of old age is in itself ageist. It's not ageist to mention a retired person being on an extended holiday either as retired people don't work anyway. She just meant that her mother is far away for a long time and is of retirement age.

The applicant (granddaughter), applicants parent (OP's DD/DS), and the applicants grandparent were all born after 01/01/83.

The passport aren't asking because it's a great grandparent, they're asking because of the 1983 rule for proof of entitlement to a British passport, which is not automatic for people born after 1983 (which all 3 people in this situation are).

You can thank the British Nationality Act 1981 for these rules.

'boomer' 🙄

Thanks for the info. So if your parents and grandparents are British citizens, holding a British passport, you aren’t automatically a British citizen? That’s insane!

was that for a first passport, seems a bit much?

Im assuming from what you've said, both you and the child's mother were born in the UK. What if the great grandmother was not born in the UK and was not British? Are they trying to say her great granddaughter then isn't British? And then by extention you and your daughter aren't British? Equally, are they saying you can go back so many generations to claim to be British? Batshit! If you didn't have the time pressure of going away (and assuming it's not a simple admin error) I'd be kicking up merry hell about this. I'd be the first constituent banging on my new MPs door.

And if your parents weren't British, then what? Your kid wouldn't be British, despite have two British citizens for parents and being born in the UK?
All this costly extra admin is fucking pointless!

This is exactly it. Thanks for summarising it so eloquently

My parents are British, born in the UK. As are their parents, and their parent's parents. All are/were British passport holders.

The applicant (granddaughter), applicants parent (OP's DD/DS), and the applicants grandparent were all born after 01/01/83.

I hadn't realised that.

Simple explanation then!

But two of those 3 people born after '83 already have passports, so checks should have already been done on the pre '83 persons citizenship status- and all 3 were born in the UK and have already submitted UK birth certs.

It’s confusing for most of us because the law written in 1981 means that just being born in the U.K. doesn’t mean that you’re a citizen. One of the baby’s parents must be a British citizen in order for the baby to qualify. This child’s mother is obviously a British citizen, evidenced by her holding a British passport. The child’s grandmother is obviously a British citizen, evidenced by her holding a British passport. Yes, Mum and Gran were both born after 1983, but they are still British citizens, and can prove such by showing their passports—they both had to clear the bar of having British parent(s) when they were granted citizenship.

Exactly. Their passports are evidence that they’re citizens.

Im not being ageist. She is of the boomer generation, so is enjoying her retirement with all the perks of someone who retired at 60, with no mortgage and a good pension. No hate, just a fact. Just because it’s been taken away from me, doesn’t mean she shouldn’t enjoy it. She earned it.

As I read it, even if the OP's mother received her citizenship by descent- IE OPs mum may not have been born in the UK but received her citizenship through her parent, she can still 'pass down' her citizenship to her daughter (the OP) because the OP was born in the UK. This would have been checked when OP got her passport.

So, it is possible to hold a passport and not be able to pass that UK citizenship to your child- but only if the child is born outside the UK and the passport that the parent has is obtained by descent.

But that does not appear to be the situation here- so I'm confused by other comments on here by people who work in this area who say it's expected.