In a landmark case, the Court of Appeal has upheld a High Court ruling that the UK’s child citizenship fee of £1,000 is unlawful.
The fees have previously been deemed controversial by many who feel that children who had a right to register as British Citizens were prevented from doing so because of the high costs.
The Home Office currently charges £1,012 for a child to register for citizenship. However, the process costs close to a third of that, at £372. The Government department says the profit is used to fund other areas of its work.
In December 2019, a High Court judge ruled that the fee was unlawful after finding it prevented many children from being registered for citizenship, leaving them feeling “alienated, second-best and not fully assimilated into the culture and social fabric of the UK”.
The case was taken to the Court of Appeal by the Home Office. However, the Court of Appeal rejected this appeal on the basis that ministers had failed to assess and consider the impact of this fee on children and their rights, highlighting that for some families it was “difficult to see how the fee could be afforded at all”.
Following the decision, the Home Office must now reconsider the fee and put new measures in place to ensure that children’s best interests are fully considered in doing so.
In response to the judgement, Chair of the Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens, Carol Bohmer, said they were delighted with the decision to rule the high fees unlawful.
She added, “We will continue in our mission, so no one is in future forced to grow up in the UK suffering the alienation and isolation that is currently the experience of so many young people.”
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