British Overseas Territory citizenship applications doubled in 2025

As the Cayman’s British Overseas Territories Citizenship web portal comes back online, Deputy Governor Franz Manderson has revealed that applications on the site doubled last year, with a quarter of those being filed in December.

The influx of applications in that month could be due to pending immigration reform, which lawmakers had been discussing since the April general election, approved last month and comes into effect on 1 March this year.

Permanent residents are required to be naturalised or registered for British Overseas Territories Citizenship, or BOTC, before they can apply for Caymanian status.

Manderson, appearing on Compass TV’s Forefront show on 22 Jan., acknowledged he did not know if the large recent increase in applications on the BOTC online portal had been responsible for it stopping working on 1 Jan., but he said he could not rule it out, stating, “I cannot say that it didn’t.”

The portal, after being out of operation for more than three weeks, appears to have come back online on Sunday, 25 Jan.

Manderson said the portal typically receives about 1,000 applications a year. In 2024, 1,100 were received, and this almost doubled last year to 2,100, with 500 of those applications being received in December.

“We had the same resources doing the work for 1,000 now having to deal with 2,000,” he said.

While the portal had been offline, the Office of the Deputy Governor, which processes the submissions, was not accepting any applications, including those by email or in person. However, Manderson confirmed that applications successfully received before the portal outage were being processed by his team.

The deputy governor explained that all application submissions from 1 Jan. had been frozen because his staff would ultimately have to manually input physical applications into the portal once operational, thus creating a further backlog.

Existing backlog

He acknowledged that there is an existing backlog of applications, that was in place before the portal went down, which had previously led to processing times taking between six months and one year.

Manderson told Forefront host Tammi Sulliman that efforts were under way to speed up the process and bring waiting times back down to four months or less.

He said the problem with the portal, which is housed within the Office of the Deputy Governor’s website, came to light when it became apparent that people were having trouble submitting their applications and that applications that were being submitted could not be seen. “So, we had to stop because we don’t want people submitting and then we can’t find their application once it’s been submitted,” Manderson said.

Fixing the portal was a “top priority”, he said, adding that a local service provider working with government on fixing the problem had contracted an overseas company to assist.

He admitted, “What is a bit, I guess, concerning to me is they can’t tell me exactly what’s wrong, so it’s a bit frustrating for me.”

Responding to concerns raised by lawyer Nick Joseph in a recent Compass article about the potential knock-on effects of the delays caused by the portal outage, Manderson said, once the site was fixed, there would be “a big rush to get everything caught up to date, so that nobody is disadvantaged.”

Joseph had surmised that each week of delay in processing a BOTC naturalisation or registration application would cost a week downstream for those permanent residents, and also Caymanians, wishing to obtain a Cayman passport. There are certain circumstances in which a person can be Caymanian but not possess a Cayman passport.

Manderson, noting that UK citizenship law governs who gets issued with a Cayman Islands BOTC passport, said, “Any Caymanian wants a Cayman passport, so we understand that that is a very critical document for people, and we need to … speed things along.”