VISITING U.K.

When my parents were alive I visited U.K. several times.  I was on a new Zealand passport and originally, when I got to Heathrow I had a choice of Commonwealth or others, later it changed to E.U. or others.  I always went to the shorter E.U. queue having been born in the U.K. and Max, who was born in New Zealand came with me and we went straight through.

Over recent years I have been thinking about visiting one last time and was about to when Covid hit.  I was shocked to read an article this morning about the fact that I would either need a British Passport or something called a Certificate of Entitlement which would cost 589 pounds whereas Doug on a New Zealand Passport having been born here would only need an ETA at 16 pounds.

I do not know why the U.K. wants to punish me for having been born there. It is not the thought of the actual travel that deters me from overseas travel but all the bureaucracy.  

Here are the relevant parts of the article.

So then I did some research and it is definite that on the 25th of February if you're a dual citizen and you're born in Britain, then you have to have a British passport.

 "If you as a Kiwi [born in NZ] wanted to go to Britain, no problem at all - just use your Kiwi passport."

It put British citizens in a worse position in their own country than visa-waiver travellers - such as New Zealand-born citizens using ETAs, he said.

His shock at the cost was matched by his outrage at the bureaucracy involved - including finding a UK passport holder to confirm his identity, form-filling, the possibility of an in-person interview at the embassy in Wellington, and having to post his New Zealand passport.

"If you don't want to send the passport, which I didn't, you have to send a photocopy of every page. And they make the point that even if the pages are blank, you've got to send a photocopy. So I sent 42 pages, 41 of which were blank. Isn't that fantastic? So, yeah, this is bureaucracy gone mad."

Vince considered whether he could get around the rule by hoping authorities assumed he was New Zealand-born - but then realised his NZ passport reveals he was born in the English city of Coventry.

The wait for a new British passport would be worrying for people with travel already booked or who had an emergency, he said.

A new passport seemed a better option than an alternative the UK government is offering - a 'certificate of entitlement' costing £589/NZ$1373 compared to £94.50/$220 for an adult passport - but it is still much more than an ETA (£16/$37 for two years), and a lot more work.

"Up until now, it's cost me around about $600, copious amounts of form filling in, and now we're still waiting to see what else they want. It has to go by special delivery - there is only one way the post office will accept old passports and that costs $121. Absolutely ridiculous. And we're in our 80s, we'll probably only ever go [to England] one more time."