Applying for a Passport for a child under a Special Guardianship Order
Applying for a Passport for a child under a Special Guardianship Order
When you have a special guardianship order for a child (SGO order), applying for a passport can be a lot more challenging than applying for a passport for your own birth child. Hopefully, by sharing my experience it will help you to have a smoother process than I did.
We are going on holiday soon and I had to renew a couple of our passports, but for Summer we are applying for her first passport. As soon as we booked our holiday we started the passport application checking and processing. As her special guardian (SGO order), I knew it was not going to be so straightforward experience, thus, I read as much information as I could from other legal guardian (SGO) experiences. And, after reading a ton of advice and their experiences, as well as their tips I rang the passport office and asked for their advice.
Sending the application
Confident I had everything prepared, and with the advice from the passport office, I sent her passport application off, along with her birth certificate, her birth mother's birth certificate, and the court documents proving that we had full legal guardianship.
After a couple of weeks, we received a letter requesting Summer's maternal grandmother's birth certificate. Huh? This is not what we were originally advised and this is when we hit a brick wall.
Birth certificates
Unfortunately, 18 months ago Summer's birth mum had disappeared without a word to us, no warning, and no way to make contact with her. And, after speaking to the passport office to explain this, they gave me some advice on how to find out and get a birth certificate for Summer's grandmother. With this advice, and with the name of the grandmother from Summer's mum's birth certificate, I started ringing around registry offices to try to track down the right one. Some were very helpful, others not so helpful. As we only had the maternal grandmother's full name, and no Date of Birth, this is what caused us the biggest challenge. One registry office had two with the exact name, but very different birth dates, and I had no clue how old Summer's maternal grandmother was.
After a very frustrating week, and a lot of phone calls, I contacted the social services which handled Summer's Special Guardian (SGO) case, to ask for their help and to try and contact Summer's birth mum, but they explained that as the case was closed (as we now had full legal guardianship), they could not help and explained I would need to hire and pay for a solicitor to track her down.
Panic ensued, how much would this cost, and how long would it take? And frustration; why wasn't this sorted out for us during the Legal Guardianship legal proceedings / process? Surely when a (Look After Child) child is coming to live with a family on an SGO, the Social Service should sort a passport out during the process and this should be handed over at the same time the child moves in with their new family.
Recontacting Passport Office
To avoid having to try to track down the birth mum, I thought I'd give the passport another call to see if they could offer any further advice, thus, I rang the passport office once more, and this time I spoke to someone who was more clued up. She suggested that I do the paternal route - that I get Summer's birth dad's birth certificate, and paternal grandmother's and return those. We also need the details of the paternal great-grandparents full details to obtain Summer's paternal grandmother's birth certificate - are you lost yet? it's complicated.
We are finally getting somewhere
Hubby rang his ex-mother-in-law who helped us with this information, and shortly after I was able to order all the required birth certificates.
I then sent off the paternal side birth certificates to the passport office and within a week..... we received Summer's birth passport! Phew.
Overall from start to finish it took approx. 10 weeks. So not too bad, but there were a lot of calls and a lot of panic, and frustration. It wasn't an easy process, and it shouldn't have been this difficult, this is something that should have been considered during the guardianship court process.
Summary
If you are reading this and wondering why we didn't get the paternal route first, this was because when we spoke to the first lady at the passport office, she said as the grandparents weren't married it wouldn't work, so she advised we have to get the maternal grandparents birth certificates - however, after ringing the passport office at a later date, I spoke to a different lady who told us differently. A little frustrated we weren't given this information to begin with, but it is sorted now, and that is the main thing.
And Summer is super excited to be going on holiday.