Hi all - long time reader first time poster here! I’m a UK citizen living and working in the US with a green card and married to my US citizen wife. Our son was born in the US a couple of years ago and has his US birth certificate and passport. At the time I registered his overseas birth with the Foreign Office in the UK and successfully received his Consular Birth Registration certificate.

I’m now looking to apply for his UK passport and hoping to use the Consular Birth registration in the passport application process to save me finding a whole range of original documents from parents and grandparents on both sides. My question is has anyone used the consular birth registration certificate when applying for a UK passport?

I’m going through the online passport application and if you tick that you have a “Naturalisation or Registration certificate” then it asks for a 7 digit certificate number usually found in the bottom left. There is no certificate number printed on the Consular registration certificate that I received - the only number is an “Entry Number” in the top right which is 6 digits and in the format xxxx/xx

When I enter that as shown it says no hyphen or / is allowed. I am going to just put the 6 numbers but wondering if I am missing something in the process?

thanks in advance!

Consular birth registration is not the same process as registration as a British citizen so you should be ticking ‘No’ to that question.

Went through this process with both of my kids. The birth certificate shows they’re British citizens by birth, not naturalised. To get that birth certificate you have to go through the rigmarole of getting parent/grandparent birth certificates, so that work is already done. All you need for the passport application is that birth certificate (and the application, photos, etc. ). Pretty easy process. Just remember it’s a 5 year child’s passport so you have to renew more frequently.

Thanks - was the birth certificate you used the consular registration one that you get when registering an overseas birth, or something different? The consular registration certificate I received does show his claim to citizenship, and to get it I had to send off my own passport and birth certificate to prove my son is eligible for citizenship by descent (although I did not need any of his grandparents docs).

Yes, that’s right. Just the consular birth certificate.

Timely thread.... I'm just about to apply for my daughter's first UK passport (now she is 16...tight as I am I didn't want to be renewing both US and UK ones every five years 😁). Got her a consular birth certificate soon after she was born.

Finally got around to doing this. Despite my daughter having the UK consular birth certificate, going through the online system they still seemed to want my own long-form birth certificate as well. No biggie of course as I have it - but I thought the whole idea of getting the consular birth cert was that you didn't need to do this (being as they have already seen it and other proving documents before, as Alan17 says).

Well that was a very quick turnaround - her passport just arrived, 2 weeks exactly!

HMPO can be very sniffy about taking the FCDO’s word for it unfortunately.

I was not able to use a consular birth cert to get my USA-born daughter's British passport recently. For the British passport application, I had to submit all the same paperwork that I had to submit for the consular birth cert. The consular birth cert itself is of no use in a British passport application. I don't see the point of it now at all.

Applying for a passport from outside the UK: supporting documents (group 3) (accessible) - GOV.UK

You should be able to submit a consular birth certificate in conjunction with the child’s birth certificate without having to supply any other supporting documents relating to the parents for births registered from 1 September 2014. From memory this is when responsibility for overseas birth registration was shifted from overseas missions to FCO Services in Milton Keynes.

https://www.gov.uk/government/public...h-registration