Nationality and Borders Bill

Lord Hacking Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 8th March 2022 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of Durham]

My Lords, in rising to support Amendment 83, tabled by the noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, to which I have added my name along with the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and the noble Lord, Lord Alton, I declare my interests as set out in the register.

I set out my reasons for supporting this amendment in Committee. We should simply not have a situation whereby people, including children, are excluded from the citizenship to which they are eligible because they do not have funds. It is nonsensical for the Government to put up a barrier to people being, and feeling, fully part of our society. The Government rightly talk about the importance of integration, community cohesion and levelling up. This policy works against all three of those.

Being a British citizen is completely different from indefinite leave to remain, and this must be constantly recognised. If people are eligible to be citizens, cost should not be a barrier. The registering of British people’s citizenship should have no revenue function, and fees should be removed altogether for children in care and for those whose registration is provided to correct a historical injustice.

I simply urge the Minister to hear the strength of feeling in the House, accept this amendment and deal with it once and for all.

[Lord Hacking (Lab)]

My Lords, I am wholly familiar with Governments siphoning off funds raised for one purpose and using those funds for a quite different purpose. I was particularly conscious of that during my years as president of the Civil Court Users Association, when the Government collected very large funds on the issue of writs and the other issues needed in the litigation process, and then used that money in a quite different sector of the court system.

I am also familiar with the disproportionate fees, compared to the administration costs, involved in the process of obtaining British citizenship. The noble Baroness, Lady McIntosh, has already given examples of that which I willingly adopt. I am aware too of this problem for a rather more personal reason, in that young members of my family, who have very little resource, have been in the process of obtaining British citizenship and have been heavily penalised—not by £1,000 but by £2,000 and more. They were young, and the family were able to provide the necessary support. But that is an example of the rampant unfairness.

My recollection—I cannot put my finger on it exactly—is that one of your Lordships’ committees recently investigated this problem and issued a report, in which it said specifically that the correct level of fees involved in the obtaining of British citizenship should be based on the administration cost and nothing else. However, the practice continues, and the provision contained in this amendment to Section 68 of the Immigration Act 2014 is very well drafted and sets out precisely what should be done. It reads as follows:

“in setting the amount of any fee in relation to registration of British citizenship the Secretary of State … must not set that amount at a level beyond the Secretary of State’s estimation of the administrative costs of the function to which the fee relates”.

There cannot be a fairer or more precise way of addressing the problem, and I congratulate the tablers of this amendment on the care and precision with which they have done it.

Since I have not tabled this amendment, it is not for me to make the decision about whether a Division should be called. That is a matter for those who have brought it forward. I look down at the leaders of my own party to see how they are going to participate in this issue—we have not heard from the noble Lord on my side what position my party is taking.

I would, however, discourage a Division at this time of night. Certainly, when I was last in the House, a number of years ago, if you put forward an amendment at Report and it had been defeated in a Division, you were not entitled to take it further—to Third Reading, for example. The fact is that those who will be voting in whatever Division is called are not in this House and have not listened to the arguments. It is a kind of routine form of voting, not the measured form of voting that happens after listening to the arguments.

[Lord Hodgson of Astley Abbotts (Con)]

My Lords, I am afraid I have to plead guilty as charged to the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Hacking, since I was chair of the committee on citizenship and citizenship engagement that he was referring to, which had among its extremely able members the noble Baroness, Lady Lister, and my noble friend Baroness Eaton.

We came across this issue, so I have some sympathy with the direction of travel of this amendment. In simple terms, while our committee was sitting the fees for naturalisation were raised to £1202, with an extra £80 if you wanted to have a citizenship ceremony. We were told that the cost of administering was roughly half that, so there was an override of about £600.

To be honest, to forgo the citizenship ceremony, which we were able to attend, would be to miss something. It was an extraordinarily moving experience to watch the people enter enthusiastically into their new life. In the margin of the meeting, they did, of course, tell us about the costs that they had to incur along the way. My major reason for supporting the direction of travel, though, is the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Alton. We are trying to promote people to come forward and anything that dissuades them is a mistake. I am not sure that we must have regard to what other countries are charging. That seems to me not necessarily something that will add to the sum of human knowledge; nor do I think there is necessarily not some room for a bit of a surcharge for the overall administration. But the underlying point is that the margin between the cost of providing the service and the cost being charged is too great.

In my view, this amendment—not in this form, but something like it—would impose some financial discipline at a lower operational level because it would impose some direct responsibility. Once it becomes a sort of global figure, nobody cares about it, is responsible for it or does anything to improve the service it is providing. That is why I think this is going in the right direction, even though I do not agree with all the detail.