New rules tied to the UK’s Electronic Travel Authorisation scheme are turning British passport renewals into a bureaucratic maze for dual nationals in France. One long-time resident, who has lived in France for over half a century and holds both French and British nationality, says the process has become so tangled that he is now being told to apply for a UK passport just to keep his status in order.
His last UK passport expired in 1990, but the paperwork he sent to the Passport Office did not get him any closer to a renewal. Officials rejected the birth certificate copy he provided because it had been issued in 2019, and then asked him to produce school reports, proof of university attendance, health reports, letters from the tax authority or any letter from the British government written before 1990.
The demand has left him facing a test of memory as much as identity. He said dual nationals without a UK passport cannot return to the UK, a claim that highlights the practical stakes for people who have lived abroad for decades and may not have easy access to records from childhood or early adulthood. For someone who has spent most of his life in France, the request for documents dating back more than 35 years is not a routine administrative hurdle. It is a wall.
The case lands at a moment when the UK is tightening travel and entry procedures through the new authorization system, and the friction is being felt most sharply by people whose lives straddle two countries. The writer’s experience also reflects a wider complaint from dual nationals in France: that the rules are being applied in a way that makes a basic passport renewal feel like a hunt for archival proof, rather than a standard citizen service.
There is another layer of pressure ahead. New price increases will apply to all passport applications, including those from overseas, adding cost to a process already weighed down by document demands and long-delayed records. For dual nationals like him, the timing matters. The passport they need is getting more expensive even as the path to obtaining it appears to be getting narrower, more exacting and far less forgiving.
That leaves one central question hanging over the system: whether the UK’s passport process can adapt to the reality of citizens who have spent most of their lives abroad, or whether they will be forced to prove a past that the state itself no longer makes easy to find.
