Home Office Challenged Over ‘Shameless Profiteering’ Over Registration Fees

The Home Office has been accused of ‘shameless profiteering’ in a legal challenge to the one-off fee of more than a thousand pounds to register a child as a British citizen. The case, which begins a three-day hearing in the high court today, has been brought by two children (known as A and O) and could benefit estimated 120,000 people in the UK.

According to the Project For Registration of Children as British Citizens (PRCBC), the legal charity behind the judicial review, the government is making £640 profit for each child registered – it reckons that the administrative processing cost is only £372 per application.

‘Tens of thousands of children who were born in this country are being charged exorbitant fees to register their citizenship rights,’ commented PRCBC’s director Solange Valdez-Symonds. ‘The futures of these children are slowly and silently being chipped away. Such barefaced profiteering from children by the Home Office is utterly shameful. Children’s rights are not for sale. We hope the High Court challenge will rightly bring an end to this injustice.’

The campaigners are calling on the Home Office to set the registration fee at ‘no more than the administrative cost’,  to introduce a fee waiver for children who cannot afford the fee; and provide a fee exemption for children in local authority care.

Read more  Jon Robins, Justice Gap, https://is.gd/4OBcus