Mark Stevens Esq
Foreign and Commonwealth Office Migration and Visa Department
Clive House Petty France London SWI
GVM 341/2
CWI/73
5 February 1981
RIGHT OF READMISSION ENDORSEMENT
My predecessor wrote to you on 27 May about this subject. I have now looked at the earlier correspondence to which you referred and in which we took a different view. I have also shown the papers to Alen Cogbill. We have considered afresh and I am writing to record our final view. 1 am sorry that it has taken so long to produce it.
The guidance in DSP Volume 25 is explicit. It provides for the endorsement of a United Kingdom passport to show that the holder is entitled to readmission to the United Kingdom if his most recent United Kingdom passport (valid or expired) was issued in the British Isles before 1 January 1973. (It also, incidentally allow for the endorsement of a Dependent Territory passport. We do not think this can be right. The 'entitled to readmission' endorsement rests on the provisions in paragraph 5 of IC 394 where readmission is clearly conditioned upon the passenger's holding (not his having held) a United Kingdom passport. It seems to us to follow that the endorsement should be made only in United Kingdom passports).
Having regard to section 1(2)(b) of the Commonwealth Immigrants Act 1962, the second limb of which exempts a BPP or BSWC who would otherwise become subject to control, it seems to us that paragraph 5 covers two types of entitlement to readmission. One is where the person is a citizen of the United Kingdom and Colonies who has been accepted for settlement (which iblies that he was subject to immigration control at the tire). The other is where he was in the United Kingdom before he became subject to control (and this applies to British subjects without citizenship too), and has a passport issued here as evidence of his presence. (In practice we treat all UKF as benefitting from both types of entitlement).
If this is right and a person may benefit even where his presence here was before he became subject to immigration control, then there is to date before which presence here should not confer an entitlement to readmission (provided that we confine ourselves to United Kingdom passports properly so called).
It seems to us therefore that the purpose behind the references to the most recent passport in DSP Volume 25 is probably deliberately to restrict the entitlement to readmission to the validity of the first passport obtained overseas; if a person obtains a second, overseas without returning to the United Kingdom in the meantime, his entitlement to readmission will lapse. This may be reasonable enough where he obtained a passport quite fortuitously in the United Kingdom when he was not subject to immigration control and did not establish residence here, and subsequently returned to his country of residance and continued to obtain fresh passports there.
1