Immigration: UK Citizenship and Nationality

Baroness Gardner of Parkes Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2013 Grand Committee

[Baroness Gardner of Parkes (Con)]

My Lords, I feel that I am a strange person to be speaking in this debate because I am not a British citizen. I have thought about it a few times, but in the days when I thought about it the Australians would have revoked my Australian citizenship. Because I was here before the immigration laws, I had the right of abode. However, I can tell you that that right has become a bit of a nightmare, because you have to renew it every time you renew your passport. You are required to send in an unbelievable number of documents, all in their original form, including my husband’s parents’ birth certificates, his birth certificate, our marriage certificate—there is a whole list—and they must all be in their original form. Some of them are now so old that if I live long enough to get another passport, I am not sure that they will be in any state to be sent to the office.

I have spoken to the department about this. The man dealing with it is in Liverpool. He said, “I can’t imagine why we have to have originals every time”. Clearly they do not want someone forging all the documents, but Germaine Greer told me that when they told her that they required 10 documents a year and that she had been here for many years and therefore needed 40 documents, she told them that she could not produce 40 originals, and in the end gave up and became British. I thought that it was interesting that that seemed to be the easiest way out; but surely it would be easier to say, “Once we have a document, we will keep an official record of it”. I can see that you have to be sure that someone is not forging documents, but these things should be simple and they are not.

Nationality is an interesting thing. I have helped some people here get British nationality. One woman from Colombia had been illegally here for 27 years. In the end, we were very fortunate. Originally she came legally as an au pair. You did not have to have a visa but came as a guest of the people who invited you to come and be part of their family. I know that well because at one time I ran an au pair agency. I was at home with my own children and could not get anyone to help, so I set up the agency and discovered that all you had to do was invite someone. This woman was fortunate because in her then illegal years she had looked after the parents of one of the very well known Lords here. She told me about this man—“Sir” someone—but it never occurred to me that he was a famous Law Lord until she brought a photo. Then we were able to get going, he supported her, and she got her right to be here. She legally stayed here for five years 20 years ago. However, the five years have to run since you received your permit to be here. Now she has two more years to go, and I want to live so long to help her.

She resents terribly, and so do a lot of other people, all the people who come in, supposedly as asylum seekers. They go to the same English classes and are not interested in learning anything at all. All they want is to be here. A lot of people who want to become British citizens feel cheated because they feel there are quick ways in which people are getting in without any of the bookwork that was referred to—learning.

Now, my right of abode, apart from anything else, costs more than my Australian passport. The other situation I found through the woman I helped is that of moving the goalposts. I have raised this at meetings that Mrs May has attended. You arrive here at a time when there is four years or six years to wait or whatever it is. By the time you present yourself, it has moved up two more years. By the time you have waited another two years before you can apply, it has moved up another two years. So in cases that I came across, applicants from Latin America had found that the goalposts had moved three or four times. That does seem to be very unfair.

A few other matters should be mentioned because time is very short, such as retention of passports. I know that there is a big backlog but people who are here on specialist visas are highly talented people who we want. Their passports are taken to some department and hung on to up to for a year before they are returned. No matter how big the backlog, something has to be done about that. If they need to go abroad during that time, they have to apply to get their passports back. They can get them back, but then they go back to the bottom of the queue and start another year. It should be possible to have the equivalent of what they used to give out in cinemas, a thing that let you reserve your place, and you could leave and go back in. I think there are so many departments all involved in citizenship—the Border Force, the Passport Office, the Post Office for your passports—and so many tests, many of which are quite unrealistic. It is time that people looked at the actual wording of these forms and simplified them so that people could understand the procedure and the ball game did not change by moving the goalposts.