Picture this. A British schoolgirl pops over to Rome to see her grandmother in April, the sort of harmless jaunt countless families make every year. Six weeks later she is still there, not because of some romantic Roman holiday but because a fresh layer of Whitehall red tape decided her other passport simply would not do.
The rules changed on 25 February. Dual nationals must now flash a valid British passport or cough up for a certificate of entitlement to prove they are allowed back into the country their own parent helped make them citizens of. Airlines, ever eager not to cop a fine, became the new border guards. No document, no boarding pass. Simple as that.
So the girl stayed put in Rome. Six weeks of school evaporated. Her teachers grew worried enough to start ringing government departments. Her local MP, Joe Powell, stepped in and made representations. Eventually the Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office coughed up an emergency travel document in May. She made it home, the passport application was processed in eight days once the paperwork arrived, and she is back at her desk. Case closed, everyone sighs with relief.
Except it is not really closed. This was not some freak administrative hiccup. It is one of several involving children and young adults caught out by the same change. Similar tales emerged from Denmark in March and Spain in April. The pattern is clear: families with kids who hold British passports alongside another nationality suddenly discover the state no longer trusts the obvious.
Despite the girl having a British parent, two valid passports and having attended school in the UK since nursery, the rule changes resulted in her being stuck in Rome and missing six weeks of school. This was not an isolated case raising concerns about government communication of policy changes.
That was Joe Powell putting it mildly. The girl's father, author Rowan Somerville, was less restrained. He called the whole saga a bureaucratic nightmare in which the embassy, Home Office and Foreign Office bounced the family from one to another. The authorities, he added, are playing with people's lives and a child's education. He labelled it loathsome.
One cannot help but agree. Here is a teenager with every legitimate tie to Britain, yet the system treated her like a suspect trying to sneak in under false papers. The government had issued warnings, true. Embassies had put out notices. Yet somehow a flesh-and-blood British child still ended up marooned for a month and a half while adults in air-conditioned offices argued over which desk owned the problem.
