A mum-of-three booked an £8,000 dream holiday for her young family – only to have her bid for a passport denied by officials claiming she was not British.

Gemma Tones, from Whitstable, has endured a five-month bureaucratic battle with the Home Office to secure the vital travel documents ahead of the trip of a lifetime to Portugal next month.

The 30-year-old was born in Yorkshire to a British father and Italian mother, has never left the country, is registered to vote, receives child benefits and pays taxes.

But officials said the nursery nurse could not derive British citizenship from her dad because her parents were not married when she was born.

Ms Tones was therefore forced to prove her mother had the right to be in the UK at the time of her birth – something which proved to be trickier than expected.

She told KentOnline: “They told me I'm not British, but I know that I am, and that gets my back up because it’s my identity they were trying to erase.”

The back-and-forth with the Home Office came about after Ms Tones had spent £8,000 on a 10-day trip to Portugal for her family’s first-ever getaway.

She has told how the seemingly simple three-week passport application process descended into a stalemate with officials.

“I was born here and if I'm good enough to pay tax and I'm good enough to pay national insurance then surely I should be able to be a citizen…”

She first applied for passports for her and her three children five months ago, forking out hundreds of pounds.

The travel documents were needed so she could take her children – two of whom are severely disabled – on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday before her eldest loses his sight.

Expecting a relatively simple process, Ms Tones was left baffled after the standard three-week processing time lapsed and she found officers were refusing to rubber-stamp all four applications.

She told KentOnline: “I was born here and if I'm good enough to pay tax and I'm good enough to pay national insurance then surely I should be able to be a citizen?

“Every time I sent the Home Office something, they changed their mind and decided I needed something else.

“I felt like I was being stupid whenever I rang them because no one seemed to understand what I was talking about.”

The hold-up with the passports was down to the question of whether or not she was entitled to British citizenship, and the children’s applications were held up as a result too.

While Ms Tones’s children also have a British father, were born here and have never left the country, their dad is not listed on their birth certificate, so they could not claim British citizenship through him.

In a bid to address the issue, Ms Tones sent the authorities evidence of her mum’s ‘settled status’ - the right of EU citizens to remain in the UK indefinitely. She also provided various statements proving national insurance contributions from 1988 onwards and a letter from her mum’s employer from 1981 to 1991.

However, officials initially said the evidence provided confirmed that her mother was financially supported by her father from 1989 to 2002, which would have legally denied her right to citizenship.

“I think the whole situation is absolutely ridiculous…”

“Therefore, for this period of time, your mother was not self-sufficient, and as such was not exercising Treaty Rights at the time you were born. Therefore, there is no claim to British citizenship through your mother,” read the email from officials.

But this week the Home Office has reversed its stance on the family’s case and now decided to grant them their passports after KentOnline contacted them to ask for clarification regarding the situation.

They said a crucial document showing Ms Tones’s mum had made national insurance contributions and was in paid employment meant that her mum had settled status - and that Ms Tones acquired British citizenship from birth.

Officials maintain Ms Tones was to blame for the delay, due to not sending the correct documents sooner. But she says she sent more than enough evidence, was given conflicting advice by workers and feels she is owed an apology.

She said: “I emailed them every day and all they said to me is you need to wait for an examiner, they're confirming your identity - but what more did they need? They had my application for five months.

“It says in the British Nationality Act that to be considered settled in a country, you have to have been free from immigration control and [my mum] would have been free from immigration control because she was exercising her freedom of movement as an EU citizen, but they didn't seem to get that connection.

“We’ve been given passports which I’m really happy about. We’re due to receive them by special delivery this week.

“But I think the whole situation is absolutely ridiculous.

“I said to them if you're going to send me out of my country, where are you going to send me? You can't send me anywhere because I was born here.

“I lost a lot of sleep because of the stress of this - it’s a lot of money we might not have been able to get back because the system is broken.”

Ms Tones has never previously held a passport simply because she has never needed one.

Before the British passports were granted, Ms Tones successfully applied last week for Italian passports after a visit to the consulate, but this meant she faced a period of uncertainty over her rights to residence in the UK post-Brexit.

This has now been resolved as her British citizenship has been confirmed.

When contacted by KentOnline for comment, the Home Office said: “Nationality is a matter of law over which His Majesty’s Passport Office has no discretion. A British passport can only be issued to British nationals.”

A group for EU citizens in the UK called the3million has also spoken out in support of Ms Tones – calling British citizenship law “pointlessly complicated”.

Andreaa Dumitrache, a spokesperson for the group, told KentOnline: “It’s disgraceful that people who have lived in the UK their whole lives are being denied their rights unjustly. For EU citizens who were born in the UK before Brexit, who never needed a British passport to go about their daily lives, to get their citizenship confirmed now can mean going down a Kafkaesque rabbit hole.

“Even where the Home Office offers a so-called ‘backup’ through a registration process, this is scant comfort as it is unaffordable to many, priced at £1,214 for children, and in any case falls out of reach once the person becomes an adult.

“No one should be denied their right to citizenship because they cannot afford it.

“We need the government to take a pragmatic approach and support people like Gemma and her children to be recognised as British citizens.”