Citizenship and Civic Engagement (Select Committee Report)

Lord Russell of Liverpool Excerpts

Monday 19th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Russell of Liverpool (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, and the committee for their report. I declare an interest as a governor of Coram, which gave evidence to the committee.

The preamble to the report states that,

“the primary objective of a nation state is the creation of a country in which every one of its citizens feels secure, engaged and fulfilled”.

The report was conducted in 2017, post referendum and pre today’s chaos. As a nation state, having had a 1,000-year start on most other nation states, you would think that we might have got the hang of it by now—but it would appear to be still a work in progress.

The report’s first key conclusion is the need for respect for the law. A particular incident that concerned me somewhat preceded this. On 4 November 2016, a Daily Mail headline described several Justices of the Supreme Court as “enemies of the people”. In Henrik Ibsen’s play of almost the same name, “An Enemy of the People”, Dr Stockmann tries to expose an environmental pollution scandal but is shouted down. Ibsen was trying to illustrate his distrust of politicians and of the blindly held prejudices of the majority—a trait sometimes referred to today as “the will of the people”.

Most shocking at the time was the apparent unwillingness of the leaders of Her Majesty’s Government to condemn the headline. Demonstrating citizenship and civic engagement starts at the top. As the report said,

“the rule of law, together with a commitment to democracy, individual liberty and respect for the inherent worth and autonomy of all people, are the shared values of British citizenship from which everything else proceeds. These are ‘red lines’ which have to be defended”.

Where have I heard that before? We need red lines to stop us devaluing such terms as “red lines” and to stop the growing tendency to play to the gallery.

Civic engagement, as mentioned by the noble Lord, Lord Wallace, was brought to my mind in a discussion a few days ago with one of his noble friends, the noble Lord, Lord German. He is one of your Lordships who visits schools around the country—mainly in Wales, in his case—to talk about our Parliament and our democracy. He ends his discussions by putting up a slide of a huge and seemingly never-ending queue of South African citizens waiting to vote in the first free and open general election in South Africa in 1994. He asks the young people he is talking to, “Do you realise how precious is the ability—nay, the right—to vote in free and fair elections? Never take it for granted”.

I want to focus on the report’s last two recommendations. Recommendation 78 suggests reducing naturalisation costs to their real level without adding a substantial profit; recommendation 79 suggests waiving the registration fee for children in care and for children who have spent all their lives in the UK. Indeed, the noble Baroness, Lady Morris, mentioned citizenship fees in her speech. The Minister will be aware of the 12 June regret Motion on the 2018 Immigration and Nationality (Fees) Regulations, moved by the noble Baroness, Lady Lister. That was an obviously uncomfortable experience for the Minister responding—the noble Baroness, Lady Manzoor, who is fortunately on the Front Bench today—and that has been the case subsequently every time this subject has been raised in your Lordships’ House. I feel genuine sympathy for her valiant attempts to try to defend what is frankly indefensible.

At the moment, fee waivers are available only for applications for limited leave to remain. There is no fee waiver for settlement, otherwise known as indefinite leave to remain, or citizenship. Many children have a legal right to apply for citizenship immediately without having to make any kind of immigration application, but if they are unable to afford the enormous fees required to achieve citizenship they have the unenviable choice of either staying undocumented or pursuing a 10-year route to settlement, since the only way they can qualify for a fee waiver is if they apply for limited leave to remain. Since each of those is typically limited to two and half years they must do this several times over the course of those 10 years. This assumes that they will be so fortunate as to qualify for a fee waiver in the first place. What a truly daunting prospect this process must be for a child, against a backdrop of there being no legal aid available at all for immigration cases since 2013.

Children in care have their local authority as their corporate parent. The latter has the responsibility to ensure that any looked-after child can apply for the most secure status possible. It seems like the world turned upside down for that local authority to have to pay an exorbitant fee to local government to discharge its duty to the children in its care. It is rather like robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Does the Minister agree that it is not in the best interests of children entitled to British citizenship to face sustained and ongoing uncertainty about their future in this country, and that there is little sense in increasing the cost to local government to care for these children if the present situation continues? Please could he explain the rationale for not having a fee waiver for children in care?