Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me, Simon Calder. It's Thursday the 19th of February.

If you are a regular listener or indeed a reader who has been following the saga of dual citizenship,

well, you may have concluded the same as I had until this morning

that actually the electronic travel authorisation system, which becomes fully functional next Wednesday,

the 25th of February, would mean that any British traveller to the UK, someone who is also a citizen of another country, can only come in with a valid British passport or a so-called certificate of entitlement connected to a foreign passport.

Let me assure you, nobody wants to apply for a certificate of entitlement

because that is a document that costs £589.

It would be much cheaper to get a British passport. The new plan, which means that

if you say are British and Canadian, you cannot apply with your Canadian passport for

an electronic travel authorisation, has meant that a lot of people have been

running around and panicking trying to get passports because otherwise they feared that the

airline might say, oh, it seems you're a British traveller and therefore you're not going to be

allowed in because you don't have this

valid British passport. You don't have a certificate of entitlement. But now, thanks to Ryanair,

I can reveal that actually an expired British passport may suffice. There's been a number of contradictory stories running around,

but I have in the past few minutes been told by Ryanair that the UK government has advised them,

Europe's biggest budget airline, that an expired British passport could be sufficient.

Ryanair says this is an UK government change, not Ryanair's and that I need to seek

further clarity on the policy directly from the UK government. Of course, I have been trying to do exactly that.

But it does raise the prospect that actually all that effort people trying to relinquish their British

citizenship even was all in vain. Let me tell you how it will work.

Airlines and ferry companies are expected to enforce the new rules, and they stand to be fined

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