Immigration and Social Security Co-ordination (EU Withdrawal) Bill

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Committee stage & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard) & Committee: 2nd sitting (Hansard): House of Lords
Wednesday 9th September 2020 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I also rise to speak in support of Amendment 30, to which I have added my name, and Amendment 68. By the end of this set of contributions, I think the Minister will feel that she is ensconced in an echo chamber from which she will find it hard to escape. She knows full well that the subject of citizenship fees has returned to haunt her, her colleagues and her predecessors, and will probably do the same to her successors. Why is this? The simple reason is that by any reasonable international comparisons, which are there to be looked at, our citizenship fees are punitively high and, for many, completely unaffordable.

At Second Reading, as others have mentioned, the Minister said:

“On the face of it, they seem high, particularly when we are talking about children, but application fees for border, immigration and citizenship services play a vital role in our ability to run a sustainable system … and substantially reduce the burden on UK taxpayers.”—[Official Report, 22/7/20; col. 2296.]


Perhaps I may gently draw the Minister’s attention to page 68 of the Windrush Lessons Learned Review. A former Home Office says:

“The basic resource for the management of the immigration system is wholly inadequate and always has been. And the fundamental reason for that is if you’re the minister and you go to the Chief Secretary and you say, ‘I want more money for the immigration service’, they say ‘you must be joking—you think the British public would support that?’”


I turn now to page 51 of the same review. This is from a member of the Home Office’s own staff:

“Staff from both Immigration Enforcement (IE) and UK Visas and Immigration (UKVI) told the review they did not feel they had received adequate training; they also mentioned that the Home Office gave applicants minimal help, often referring people to the Gov.uk website, which staff themselves said they struggled to understand or navigate.”


What is described in the review is a cause of shame and embarrassment. I hope sincerely that the lessons that the Home Secretary has publicly stated would be taken on board and acted on will be demonstrated in the way in which the Government try to navigate their way through some of the complexities and inevitable consequences, many of them unforeseen, of this Bill.

Amendment 30 asks that EEA and Swiss nationals, who of course are eligible to apply for settled status, are not encouraged to go for this as the cheaper, easy option, because in many cases they are eligible for, and may wish to apply for, citizenship. The high fees make settled status a more realistic option for many but it is not necessarily a course of action that will be in their best interests.

I draw the attention of the Minister and her officials to the detailed submission made in July of this year by the PRCBC and Amnesty International to the Independent Chief Inspector of Borders and Immigration for an inspection called “A Further Inspection of the EU Settlement Scheme”. The submission concludes by highlighting that:

“There is, therefore, a huge risk that many British children and young people of EEA/Swiss parentage will be wrongly led to not have their British citizenship confirmed or register for that citizenship to which they are entitled.”


I ask the Home Office, at the very least, to read that submission carefully and to digest its very detailed contents and case studies so that on Report we can have a discussion in which it is clear that the issue is better understood.

As reported on page 50 of the Windrush Lessons Learned Review document, a former Minister commented on the

“total lack of proper administrative competence, basically”

that the scandal had highlighted. Can we not do better than this?

Amendment 68 is more specific about the position regarding fees for the registration of British citizenship, particularly for children in care looked after by a local authority. It also asks the Home Office to raise awareness of people’s right to register their citizenship. I ask the Home Office, when looking at the document submitted to the independent inspector, to look very specifically at the case of a young lady called Mercedes, who was brought up in care, and to see the enormous complications that resulted from her situation and, frankly, the rather inadequate way in which both local government and the Home Office dealt with her parlous situation.

Both amendments have in common a challenge to the Home Office and the Government to live up to their responsibilities and core principles and values, which were often so lamentably absent during the sorry Windrush saga. As I asked earlier, can we please not do better than this?

We shall study the Minister’s responses carefully and hope and expect that at least some of the concerns and questions raised will, at the very minimum, be acknowledged. We are very happy to work with her, if she so wishes, between now and Report if she sees any merit in some of the arguments that we are putting forward. If not, she knows that all of us will be back at Report.

[The Earl of Dundee (Con) [V]]

My Lords, I support Amendments 30 and 68, as proposed by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister of Burtersett.

Clearly, as prevented by Amendment 30, EEA and Swiss nationals should not be denied their British citizenship just because registration costs might have become too much for them to afford. Nor, of course, as protected against in Amendment 68, ought children looked after by a local authority to be caught up within the same anomaly.

However, although the corrective of Amendment 30, if accepted, might subsume that of Amendment 68, nevertheless the noble Baroness is quite right to spell out in its own right the threat to children looked after by local authorities, and the necessary remedy which she proposes within Amendment 68.

I hope that my noble friend the Minister will agree and can accept these amendments.