British Citizens’ Rights Debate
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Lord Cormack
Main Page: Lord Cormack (Conservative - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Cormack's debates with the Department for Exiting the European Union
British Citizens’ Rights
Lord Cormack Excerpts(5 years, 5 months ago)
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Lord Callanan
We are committed to respecting the rights of EU citizens. The noble Baroness will know that it was one of our priorities in the negotiations. It was the first issue to be concluded. If the EU matched our level of ambition in many areas, there would have been no more problems. We are continuing to pursue this issue. We have already issued, effectively, a unilateral guarantee. We will guarantee citizens’ rights in a no-deal scenario. The rights we have offered EU citizens are, in most cases, far superior to the rights that have been offered by other EU member states to UK citizens.
Lord Cormack (Con)
My Lords, it is three years since some of us urged the Government to take the moral high ground on this one. While I entirely approve of all that my noble friend has said in expressing his sentiments, Parliament is treading water at the moment. Nothing is happening. This House rose at something like 5.30 pm yesterday, and it is expected to rise at 6.30 pm today. We have ample time to get a Bill through both Houses that will guarantee these rights unilaterally and put our European friends and colleagues on their back legs, if you like, so they can respond. Let us do the right thing, and let us do it now. I put it to my noble friend that we will lose nothing, but we will gain very much.
Lord Callanan
I thank my noble friend for his support, but we have already started to implement, effectively, our no-deal guarantee. We have already opened the settled status scheme for applications and, as I mentioned in the Statement, something like 750,000 EU citizens have already applied through it and applications are continuing to be processed as we go. We have guaranteed rights to citizens of EU member states in the event of no deal. We are conducting a series of exercises to get out, in co-ordination with national embassies, to explain to EU citizens what those rights are and how we will protect them. I think we have a good record on this.