Supreme Court throws out legal challenge against £1,012 child citizenship fee

Judges recognise Home Office fee excludes large numbers of children from citizenship rights - but says Parliament is authorised to set amount

The Home Office will now continue to profit from the fee of £1,012 for a process that costs £372, unless it changes its policy or if Parliament acts (PA Archive)

The Supreme Court has thrown out a legal challenge against the government’s £1,000 child citizenship fee, which campaigners argue many children cannot afford.

The Home Office will now continue to profit from the fee of £1,012 for a process that costs £372, unless it changes its policy or if Parliament acts.

In a ruling handed down on Wednesday, the Supreme Court upheld the findings by the High Court and the Court of Appeal that the fee excludes large numbers of children from their rights.

However, in the final ruling following a four-year long legal battle, the court decided to rule in favour of the Home Office, stating that Parliament has authorised the government to set the fee.

Solange Valdez-Symonds, chief executive at the Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens (PRCBC), which brought the challenge, said she was “profoundly disappointed” by the judgement.

“But we remain determined to bring an end to this injustice and secure the rights of all children connected to the UK to have the citizenship that is their right by Act of Parliament,” she added.

“It’s been more than two years since the High Court found that this huge fee has been depriving many children of their citizenship rights – causing them to feel alienated, excluded and isolated in their country of birth and home, often the only place they know. The home secretary has since done nothing to correct the appalling impact this fee has on young people.”

In December 2019, a High Court judge ruled that the fee was unlawful after finding a “mass of evidence” that 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”.

A Home Office appeal against the High Court’s ruling was rejected by the Court of Appeal last February.

However, a second legal argument, that the fee is so high as to make the child’s statutory right to citizenship meaningless in practice, was rejected by the Supreme Court of Wednesday.

Lord Hodge said the fee was “a question of policy which is for political determination” and that it was “not a matter for judges for whom the question is the much narrower one of whether Parliament has authorised the [home secretary] to set the impugned fee at the level which it has been set”.

Child O, the claimant in the case, said: “At school, I have lots of friends, they are all British. It makes me sad that I was born here and I’m now 14 but do not have citizenship. I’m no different to my friends but I can’t share my feelings about not having my citizenship as I worry that they won’t accept me. I feel very let down and alone.”

Lawyers and campaigners are now calling for Parliament to intervene and limit the fee to administrative costs or scrapping it altogether for children in care and those who cannot afford it.

PRCBC and Amnesty are now also calling for changes to the fee to be made through the Nationality and Borders Bill.

Steve Valdez-Symonds, Amnesty International UK’s refugee and migrant rights director, said: “This fee deprives thousands of children of their citizenship rights, yet the Home Office has chosen to keep overcharging, despite the alienation and exclusion this is causing.

“The Home Office is using the fact that some British children must formally register their citizenship to impose a tax that other British people do not have to pay – it is a form of exploitation though sadly one the Supreme Court has today ruled is permitted under current legislation.”