Does anyone here have experience trying to get a UK passport for a child born in Taiwan to British parents (mother and father). After scouring theses forums, I read anecdotes that the UK Passport Agency does not accept the hospital birth certificates, only the Household Registration (HHR). Only kids born to a Taiwanese + foreigner would get HHR that I am aware of. Unfortunately Taiwan doesn’t have any standard official birth certificate like other countries.
Also does anyone have experience applying for a UK child passport from Taiwan, rather than inside the UK.
The UK does accept the hospital birth certificates, and as you are both foreigners this is all you will have. Your hospital will issue a Chinese birth certificate, and maybe an English birth certificate. Both are useful, but you should get the Chinese one translated to English and notarized, one company will usually be able to do both things for you. I would also suggest getting the English birth certificate notarized, we didn’t do this, but we had the English HHR transcript so we felt they wouldn’t care too much about the English birth certificate, and we were right. You can apply for consular birth registration, and a passport, neither are legally required on the UK side, but if you plan to stay in Taiwan your child will need a passport. HM Passport Office say new passport applications will take up to 8 weeks, but in our case (last month) it only took 4 weeks from them receiving the documents to sending out the passport. It may be different for you, as your circumstances are different to ours, but as well as the newborn’s, we also had to send the birth certificates of both parents, and the four grandparents.
Thanks. From your reply it sounded like you’re a UK + TW couple, with HHR for the child? This case is UK + UK. Can you describe a bit more about how you applied for a UK passport from Taiwan?
I read elsewhere that the consular birth registration is useless and not valid for UK passport applications. It’s more just if you want to have the birth optionally registered in the GRO for ancestry purposes.
The whole process is online, you won’t even need to go the British Office in Taipei. The consular birth registration is sort of useless for most people, but since your birth will not be registered with the Taiwan government via the HHR, I would recommend you register with the UK government so your child can apply for copies of their UK birth certificate if anyone needs to see a birth certificate and the hospital they were born at closes down, or you and your child are not in Taiwan. Consular birth registration is expensive though, £225 with the international delivery to Taiwan. Originally we didn’t plan to do it, but the Chinese birth certificate only shows my Chinese name, and I want a document that shows me as the father using my English name. We have the hospital English birth certificate but it is hardly official looking. You don’t need the UK consular birth certificate for the passport application, in fact we applied for our passport before the consular birth registration. Their website even says that the consular birth registration is not needed to apply for a passport.
@meishijia, ressurecting this post to ask a question.
I’m in a similar situation to you, one British parent, one Taiwanese parent.
I’d like to know what you guys did about names on your birth certificate and passport.
Was it possible to have an English name (not pinyin) on any of your documents?
In my case neither parent was Taiwanese. At the hospital they gave us a Chinese and an English birth cert. The Chinese cert has no name on it. For the English cert they asked for the name and they recorded that as I had written it. Then I took that to the public notary who stamped it and I used it to apply for their passport (Irish). No hiccups along the way it went OK. You can - I imagine - record any regular English name that you want. No mention of any pinyin or anything like that.
We are one british and one taiwanese parent. At the hospital we requested an english language birth certificate and put the ‘proper’ english name, not a pinyin version. If I remember well there’s a thread somewhere that basically says if you don’t have an english birth certificate it is a lot more diffcult/impossible.
When we went to get all our other documents we could use the english birth certificate to show the correct english name.
Request an English birth certificate at the hospital.
The hospital gave me a copy with a blank space for my kid’s name. I didnt like the chinglish on the certificate so the hospital told me to edit the copy. Every hospital basically designs their own i guess.
I gave it back and the next day i got an english birth certificate that i had edited.
The name on that is her English name and totally different to my kid’s Chinese name. It isnt pinyin.
I then used that to apply for a British passport. No problem. Just make sure the parents are named on the certificate.
If you can get 5 or ten originals as they will be needed.
I did ten for my son. I have one original which he needed could not use a certified copy. His mom might have one but she doesn’t know where she may have put it.
I saved all my sons documents from his childhood. It been a life saver for him later on in life.
He needed an original birth certificate for security clearances a few weeks ago. He was born in 1991