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

Baroness Altmann Excerpts

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

[Baroness Hamwee (LD) [V]]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, has been terrier-like in her pursuit of these issues. I, like the whole House, am grateful to her for that and I too thank the organisations she mentioned.

The fees are to exercise a right, but a right is no use if you cannot exercise it. The fees are a deterrent. They are a deterrent if you think that you are in a sufficiently secure position and do not understand the distinction between immigration status and citizenship. They are a deterrent if you are told by the Government that you are in secure position through the European Union settled status scheme. They are obviously a deterrent if you cannot afford them. I will not be the only Member of the Committee who has heard distressing stories of families who have realised that they cannot afford to pay for the citizenship registration of all family members and have selected some. If there is a mother with four children—well, we can all do the maths.

The noble Baroness used words, which I have written down, that are about more than security; they are about a sense of belonging. Otherwise, over the years why would so many people have chosen to become citizens through a sometimes pretty laborious route, having to take tests about things that would probably be mysteries to many of us and culminating in citizenship ceremonies? I have been to one. The ceremony is an important part of the whole process—the recognition of that belonging.

Everyone understands that there are administrative costs to these things, but the current fees far exceed the costs. There is a surplus—I use that term rather than “profit”, because I understand that the Minister protests at the term “profit”—in the order of £600, as I understand it, and £800 in the case of adults, where the fees are something like £1,200. The Home Office talks about this surplus being justified because of the benefit, but I do not understand the logic of citizenship being a benefit if indefinite leave to remain is an equivalent, or at least sufficient to meet all the attributes of citizenship, as seems to be argued by the Home Office.

The noble Baroness mentioned the Windrush scandal, and I am sure the Home Office must be anxious not to get into a similar situation. It has said that all Wendy Williams’s recommendations are accepted. About three of those are about meaningful engagement with stakeholders and communities and the use of research. If the Home Office were to engage on this topic and undertake research, I think it would understand how very fully these issues play with the people affected. In any event, as has been said, citizenship is about rights—the right to citizenship of the children referred to—and we should not put blocks in the way of rights.

[Baroness Altmann (Con)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, for the excellent way in which she introduced these two amendments. I have added my name to Amendment 30, but I support Amendment 68 as well. I echo her words and those of the noble Baroness, Lady Hamwee, in thanking the Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens and Amnesty International UK for their helpful briefings.

I will not detain the Committee long, but I emphasise and urge my noble friend to consider that, as the two noble Baronesses said, this is about not a benefit but a statutory right to give someone the security of UK citizenship. If the cost of the administration is £372 according to the Home Office, it seems difficult to understand why three times that amount—a 200% mark- up—is applied to those trying to exercise their rights. It should not be a business transaction; that should not be any part of this equation.

During the passage of the British Nationality Act 1981, it was said that Parliament intended that all children growing up in the UK with that connection

“should have as strong a sense of security as possible.”—[Official Report, Commons, 24/2/81; col. 177.]

Charging more than £1,000 will clearly be prohibitive. As both noble Baronesses who have spoken said, the High Court found in 2019 that unaffordability meant that children who were born here—who feel British—feel alienated. Have we not learned from the Windrush generation that people should not be excluded from their citizenship rights? Indeed, on the question of Windrush, this could be a near exact repeat of what happened. In the 1980s, Parliament gave people the right to register as British citizens, but apparently they were discouraged from exercising that right. Just as it wrongly told the Windrush generation that immigration status was the same as having citizenship, I hope that today the Home Office will not repeat the mistaken claim that British people do not need British citizenship and are adequately provided for by applying for a different immigration status. These are lessons that were highlighted in the report of the Windrush Lessons Learned Review and I hope that we will take them seriously. I support these probing amendments and hope that my noble friend will be able to address them before Report.