Travellers are in a tailspin after they discovered new passport rules for travel to Britain – and some are now working out if they are even classed as UK citizens.
Passport wait times are also becoming a key concern for dual-national New Zealanders travelling soon,who need UK passports before they can fly.
For some, it’s first a question of finding whether they are in fact British citizens.
New zealanders Heather and John Wiltshire are booked on a holiday to the UK and Europe in 10 weeks’ time – but she’s not even sure if she will get on a plane.
She has only ever had a New Zealand passport, but as she was born in the 1960s to UK-born parents, she discovered only in the last few days that she could be classed as a citizen and refused boarding.
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“I was so stressed that I just felt like vomiting. It was awful,” she said.
“I was phoning travel agents. Nobody knew. Everybody was ducking for cover and saying that they were waiting to find out themselves.
“So this was last Saturday morning. I didn’t sleep at all on Friday night.
“I was just sick, absolutely sick to the stomach because we’re leaving in 10 weeks and I’ve spent 30k on this holiday. And I’m still beside myself because I don’t know whether I’m getting this passport or not.”
Even armed wiht her parents’ birth certificates, wedding certificate, and her mother’s passports, she cannot tell whether she was ever given UK citizenship, as she was born in Aotearoa.
As young children were simply added to parents’ passports in the past, she doesn’t know if that means she is now classed as British.
Her concern is that he would not be able to navigate border controls if her passport does not land in time.
Her New Zealand passport is also in the UK passport Office as part of the process of getting the new UK one.
“And then when you go through to apply for the British passport and it tells you what to send, they make some comment about how they can actually cancel the passport that you send. So I have to send my New Zealand passport in, and they could actually cancel it.”
Passport timeframes
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The British high Commission maintains it has kept people informed of changes through social media and website updates as 2024. It referred RNZ’s question on passport timeframes to the “Passport Office through gov.uk”.
A Google search of that informs customers they could “usually get your passport within three weeks”.
It may take longer than that if they needed more details, or to set up an interview.
“There are different turnaround times if you’re applying from another country,” it said, although the accompanying link does not give timeframes for applying from another country, or if someone was renewing a long-since expired passport.
“I have had no reason whatsoever to suddenly query whether I could travel on my NZ passport to the UK. Why would I suddenly think anything would have changed, or fear that my travel would effectively be cancelled? The answer is nothing – not any idea that I had to do anything more than have a valid NZ passport as I have before.
“Not having heard from a travel agent, not having heard from my airline, having no awareness whatsoever of any of this and not being a social media user. So when they say they’ve been posting it. Posting it where? Has it gone out to dual nationals? And have they made any effort to reach out to dual nationals that they know are in the country?”
Andrew Gill was 12 when he emigrated in 1968 with his parents on a British passport, which expired a decade later and has not been renewed.
He, too, has travelled regularly to Britain on a New Zealand passport.
The change is due to come in on February 25,and he is booked to fly to England at the end of march. He thought all he needed was an electronic travel authority, or ETA – costing £16/$37 – but last week joined the scramble for a UK passport.
The passport has so far cost him £177/$407, with related costs and the stress of waiting for it to be issued and returned in time.
The cost can vary – a standard passport renewal for a recently expired passport costs £108/$248 for an adult,
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The Facebook Pixel is a JavaScript code snippet that website owners install on their webpages to track visitor activity. It reports this data back to Facebook,enabling advertisers to measure the return on investment of their ad campaigns and build targeted audiences.
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The code snippet specifically tracks a ‘PageView’ event, which is triggered when a user loads a webpage. This event is fundamental for measuring website traffic and understanding user behaviour.
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