The practicalities of the new UK Electronic Travel Authorisation

[IvanV]

There's an article in this week's Private Eye about how the new immigration rules don't work for dual nationals. By way of reminder, since it hasn't been very well publicised, as of 1 April 2025, if you are an EU national (also EEA and Switzerland) and want to come to the UK for a visit, you have to apply for an Electronic Travel Authorisation (ETA), which costs £16.

Now my daughter is a dual national, and made a brief trip to Czech last weekend. Previously she could easily do that with her Czech passport. She accidentally left her British passport in her student room at university, so proposed to travel with her Czech passport. It was a bit late to make such a long trip to go and fetch the passport, so I said, well just pay that £16 for an ETA to make sure you can get back into the country. But she failed to get one, at about the third question, which was "what country do you live in?" "UK" is not an answer you can even enter to that question. I also read from the Private Eye article that further down the list of questions is "what other nationalities do you have." British dual nationals cannot get an ETA, even if they live abroad. Of course you could lie and get one, as my daughter could also have done. But that's not usually a very good approach to immigration matters.

There were two points in my daughter's trip home that were potentially difficult. First was boarding the aircraft. The airline rep at the gate asked to see her ETA, as she was asking everyone else without a British passport. But she replied, (in perfect Czech which always helps when dealing with Czech authorities) that she didn't need one, as she is a British resident. The airline didn't ask for any proof of that. It may have helped that my wife went before her in the queue, and gave just the same answer. But my wife's situation is different - she has settled status. I don't think an airline can easily check that you have that, or even reasonably ask for a demonstration of that, as it is electronic and hasn't been designed for easy demonstration to airlines. So I think the airline in practice just has to believe you. Though that was Wizzair, and they aren't as unpleasant about such things as Ryanair, who have sometimes required more restrictive things than immigration, because they want it to be easy for themselves to be sure. I did in fact have a look on Ryanair's website to see what they think. They did not give an indication that you have to prove these things to them at the gate with documentation, probably because it is impractical. I think Ryanair won't like that at all, and will be lobbying to have something more determinative and straightforward that they can check and be sure. So I wonder how this will develop.

Second was arriving at the UK airport. Now I did some googling, and my information was that in the present early stages after implementation of this, a person in my daughter's situation might suffer delays at immigration while additional checks were made, but would probably be admitted. My daughter suggested she go to the e-gate and see if she got in, and I advised her to try to go through before my wife. I rather suspected that when my daughter put her passport on the e-gate at immigration, it would reject her on the grounds that she neither had an ETA nor settled status. But in fact it just let her through. So I think that at present, immigration e-gates are not set up to detect if you have an ETA. They may not even have been set up to detect settled status either, as they probably didn't need to before now. Probably they will now have to be, if this is to make any sense. But probably they will be rolled out across airports, and it won't happen on a single date. Maybe my daughter was lucky to be entering at Luton, which would not be such a priority as the larger airports for immigration to fix up the gates to detect all that.

The Private Eye article drew attention to the situation of dual nationals who live abroad, don't have a British passport, but aren't allowed an ETA. Children in particular may well not have a British passport in such a situation. My daughter didn't get a Czech passport until fairly recently, because why go to the expense and trouble of getting one. (Fortunately, in Czech, you get passports and ID cards at local town halls, so it is much less fuss than Britain.) So when this is enforced, they will have to get a British passport to enter Britain. Well in theory they don't, because you can alternatively get a certificate that you don't need an ETA. But it costs £600, which is a lot more expensive than a passport or an ETA. So that is a very silly provision, that practically no one would take up unless there were in some curious situation I haven't thought of.

I had a couple of sleepless nights about whether my daughter was going to be deported, or held until I could go on a long trip to fetch her passport. I made her show me where her university room keys are. She was even joking to her friends about whether she might fail to turn up for things, in case she might be deported. But it turned out to be no worry, at least for now.

At the end of the day, this £16 ETA is largely performative. It seems to serve no useful purpose that couldn't be equally served by just letting these people in and recording their entry. The only additional information they get from it is from asking the question, what address can you be contacted at while in the UK? But this is a silly question often asked by immigration in many countries, because many visitors do not have any such reliable contact address, and are not required to stay at a single location while in the country. You just have to put in what you think you can get away with.

[Woodchopper]

Yes, my friend found that as well. He's a dual national with an expired UK passport who lives in a European country. He found that he was unable to fill in the form after he entered the information that he is a UK citizen.

There will also be lots of people who live abroad who are British citizens by descent but don't have a British passport.

[IvanV]

There will also be lots of people who live abroad who are British citizens by descent but don't have a British passport.

Well that's an interesting question, which the Shamima Begum case is relevant to. The reaction of many such people to the question "are you British" would be "no" or "not at the moment", but that might be a questionable answer. If you have the right to assert British residence and get a British passport, are you British before you do that?

According to the UK Supreme Court in the Shamima Begum case, perhaps you are British. They ruled that Shamima Begum is Bangladeshi by descent, and therefore of Bangladeshi nationality.

But according to the Bangladeshi authorities, she isn't Bangladeshi until she applies for Bangladeshi nationality, and they would have it refused it. I rather suspect that it if this case was the other way around, a person of British descent who hadn't yet applied for British residence and a passport, the British authorities would give the same answer that the Bangladeshi authorities gave.

And indeed that would be consistent with how the British authorities behaved in the case of people like Spike Milligan, and the Windrush people. Milligan applied to renew his British passport, and was refused on the grounds that under the new nationality act he as no longer British. Rather he would have to apply to be British, which people in his circumstances were entitled to be. But he wasn't British until he did that, and went through a procedure that required him to make an oath of loyalty to the British crown. And maybe these days even have take a test of English language and cultural knowledge - I don't know if that applies to people who might be British by descent.

A person may well be unaware that they are British by descent. Or unaware of whether they might be. Or not know if they would succeed in applying for it. I have quite a bit of Irish in my ancestry. Both my mother and my father have an Irish grandparent, and there's a bit more further back. My Dutch ancestors immigrated to Liverpool, so no surprise. I wasn't sure whether I could be Irish until I looked into it quite carefully, and it turns out that I can't be.

[Woodchopper]

There will also be lots of people who live abroad who are British citizens by descent but don't have a British passport.

Well that's an interesting question, which the Shamima Begum case is relevant to. The reaction of many such people to the question "are you British" would be "no" or "not at the moment", but that might be a questionable answer. If you have the right to assert British residence and get a British passport, are you British before you do that?

As far as I know British citizenship is passed automatically from the parent to the child the moment their child is born, so long as the parent was born in Britain.* Having a passport confirms that, but someone is still a citizen even if they don't have one.

*If the parent was born elsewhere it gets complicated.

[noggins]

I cannot fathom the Begum case: a person is a citizen of country X if X agree they are, end of argument.

[IvanV]

I cannot fathom the Begum case: a person is a citizen of country X if X agree they are, end of argument.

I remain astonished by that case. And also disappointed that the present government hasn't fixed it case by restoring her British citizenship. But they appear to want to look as "tough" on immigration as their predecessors. Their complaint about the prior government is that they were using silly ineffective methods, like the ridiculous Rwanda stuff, not that they were being unduly strict on it.

There will also be lots of people who live abroad who are British citizens by descent but don't have a British passport.

Well that's an interesting question, which the Shamima Begum case is relevant to. The reaction of many such people to the question "are you British" would be "no" or "not at the moment", but that might be a questionable answer. If you have the right to assert British residence and get a British passport, are you British before you do that?

As far as I know British citizenship is passed automatically from the parent to the child the moment their child is born, so long as the parent was born in Britain.* Having a passport confirms that, but someone is still a citizen even if they don't have one.

*If the parent was born elsewhere it gets complicated.

And that is exactly one of the cases where it is problematic.

And as the Shamima Begum case also shows, you can be refused British citizenship that is seemingly certain, even if you have only tenuous rights to another country's nationality, if they don't like you. So you can't really be certain if you have it until you apply for it.