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Hi Guys

I need your help. I got my citizenship in Jun 2015. My wife has recently applied and got aproval for naturalisation in Dec 2015 and had ceremony on 25 Feb 2016. I have just read about returning bio metric. However, I have not returned any bio metric myself or even for herself.

Even the council did not take BRP for my wife and advise us anything.

I am just wondering do I have to submit my wife's BRP or not? Its been over 5 days now so worried about fine now.We actually made application last year in Sep 2015 through Council. So the council did not inform us bec I believe the rule was not there. Not been made aware in Feb 2016 at the time ceremony.

Please advise

Thanks
Kunal

The official requirement came into effect in January this year. You should be fine but you can send them back as they are of no use now.

CR001 wrote:they are of no use now.

Unless you had children born in the UK after you were granted ILR and before your naturalisation.

Hi

Thanks for coming back to me.

Shall I send them back for myself as well even though I got my passport last year back in sep 2015.

I will write covering letter to cover mypoint?

thanks
Kunal

vinny wrote:

CR001 wrote:they are of no use now.

Unless you had children born in the UK after you were granted ILR and before your naturalisation.

Can someone clarify this point for me? I'm in exactly this position at the moment. My application for naturalisation is currently lodged (I applied last week). I used the NCS so I've still got the original BRP with me. However, I've just had a baby daughter last month and we want to get her a passport as soon as possible.

As I understand it, I *MUST* send the physical BRP card as proof of my ILR as part of the passport application form, is that right? I can't use a certified copy of it? So for the 3+ weeks or so that it takes them to process the application, I will have no BRP and therefore should not travel? This is not an issue as we had no plans to travel, but I just wanted to clarify.

And once the passport is granted to my baby daughter, will I have any further need to prove my ILR status with regards to her? I understand that once I am granted citizenship, I will have to return the BRP, but at a later stage, if I again needed to prove that I was a permanent resident in the UK at the time of my daughter's birth, I would no longer have any proof. My citizenship was not granted until after the time of her birth, so I would be in a sort of paperwork limbo where I would have no lasting proof of my status at the time of her birth? Given the birth certificate itself does not prove that she has British parents, I understand that her passport will be the primary method of proving her British nationality, but for example, what if she loses it? What proof of citizenship could we use to prove her British nationality if the birth certificate doesn't prove it, and I no longer have proof that I had ILR at the time of her birth? Sorry for the large number of questions in one post, but I can see some potential for confusion down the track on this issue.

Thanks,
David

Dear David,
One of our member is in a mess with this problem. Another member said he spoke to the home office and he was allowed to hold on the BRP card , till his child get British citizenship.

A difficulty is that a parent's ILR confers their subsequent UK-born child's British citizenship automatically, from birth.

There may also be a problem with using a British passport as the primary proof of citizenship.

Perhaps your MP should raise these issues?

Thanks Tamilmaran and Vinny for your replies.

Hmmm. So if I need to contact the Home Office to ask for an exemption to the requirement of returning my BRP, how should I do that? They seem to make it extremely difficult to find any way of contacting them directly. I'd prefer to avoid hiring a solicitor for something like this because (for now) there is no legal issue - I should receive naturalisation soon and my daughter is British and will receive her passport and PROBABLY there will never be an issue.

But it does seems stupid that they haven't given people like me a way of maintaining proof of our children's eligibility for citizenship. Maybe they never thought about this problem when they changed the rules recently. I would be happy if they replaced the BRP with a certificate to advise that I was a holder of ILR for a certain period of time. And they could easily see that if I received Citizenship in 2016, I must have been a holder of ILR for the 12 months prior to the application so therefore my daughter's claim to citizenship is clear. But that's only if they apply such logic, and I've dealt with the Home Office enough they don't use logic enough - they only use RULES.

Would the Application for confirmation of British nationality status form NS help?
https://www.gov.uk/government/publicati ... us-form-ns

It says it applies for a letter which confirms that you have British citizenship. I assume that retaining a copy of this letter would be sufficient to prove that you have citizenship at any time in the future and would alleviate the need for me to have a BRP to prove my ILR status?

One thing to note is that it doesn't seem to allow you to apply on behalf of someone else, it seems to imply that the applicant must be the Citizen in question. As such, I don't think I could apply for my baby daughter?

I see now that it costs £198 to apply for this confirmation of citizenship. So the question remains... is it better to just apply for the passport for now while I still have the BRP, and keep my fingers crossed that not having retained proof of ILR will never be an issue? Or is it better to pay the £198 now while I can actually prove citizenship through my ILR, so that when the BRP is returned, my daughter will have a document that *SHOULD* continue to prove citizenship... It really shouldn't be this difficult.