British mother and children feels 'unwelcome in own country' after getting blocked from flight from UK over dual citizenship rules

A British woman has described feeling "unwelcome in my own country" after airline staff refused to let her board a flight with her two young children due to new dual nationality regulations.

Colette Bjorn-Alderson, 33, had been travelling to attend her best friend's wedding in Wales when she was stopped at Copenhagen Airport's check-in desk.

The mother was left stranded with her six-week-old baby Rowan and 23-month-old son Fearn after staff informed her the family lacked the correct documentation.

"It was a nightmare. I've cried a lot," she told The Times. "Thankfully, some kind strangers helped because I was left trying to sort out the Home Office stuff, breast-feed my baby and look after my toddler."

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She added: "I feel so unwelcome in my own country. I lived in the UK for 28 years. I grew up in Altrincham and all my family are there."

Regulations introduced in February now require British citizens to present either a valid UK passport or a certificate of entitlement costing £589 to enter the country.

Bjorn-Alderson said these requirements had not been adequately communicated to British nationals residing in Denmark, and having flown to the UK with her elder son on a Ryanair service in April, she assumed the same arrangements would work again.

The family began the application process immediately after Rowan's birth, but the timeline proved impossible to meet.

She continued: "The British passport application can take up to three months, not including postage time. The certificate of entitlement takes eight weeks and you have to have a birth certificate, so there was no way I could apply for that for Rowan."

Submitting the Danish passport for processing would have left both children without any travel documents, making the trip entirely unfeasible.

Mrs Bjorn-Alderson relocated to Denmark five years ago to work as a yoga instructor, where she subsequently met and married Rasmus, a 38-year-old Danish carpenter.

Both children hold British citizenship alongside their Danish passports, yet ironically her husband faces no such barriers, he can visit the UK simply by purchasing a £20 electronic travel authorisation.

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The family had been scheduled to depart on a Norwegian Airlines flight to Manchester on Monday morning when they were halted at the check-in counter.

What followed was an exhausting process of sending multiple document photocopies to the Home Office, which ultimately ruled the family could not travel.

"I've rung all the embassies I can think of, but there seems to be nothing we can do," Mrs Bjorn-Alderson said.

The disruption has cost her family more than £1,000 in altered arrangements, and she had hoped to introduce her newborn to three brothers who have yet to meet him.

A Home Office spokesman said it did not comment on individual cases, however, a spokesman said that "passport applications made in Denmark for a child’s first British passport usually take four weeks".

The Bjorn-Alderson family are far from alone in encountering these difficulties.

An Aberdeenshire family faced a similar predicament in May when they were blocked from boarding a return flight from Alicante because their baby lacked the proper passport. Lily Rodgers was born in Scotland but holds an Austrian passport through her father Philipp, 34.

Her mother Sarah Rodgers said she wanted to highlight the new requirements. "I know lots of people with dual-nationality kids, and everyone I've spoken to wasn't aware," she told the BBC.

Prior to the rules taking effect, campaign group The3million, which advocates for EU citizens in Britain, cautioned that the Home Office had "not done enough to warn dual nationals of the serious impact this will have on them".

The Independent Monitoring Authority, the statutory watchdog protecting EU citizens' rights post-Brexit, noted there had been "widespread public confusion" regarding the new travel checks.

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