British Citizenship Fees: Children

Owen Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 4th September 2018 Westminster Hall

[Owen Smith (Pontypridd) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. Like others, I congratulate the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) on bringing this debate to the House. It will be an important contribution to the review that the Minister is undertaking, which I hope will come to the right conclusions.

I do not think this is a terribly complicated affair, and I do not need to give a long speech to spell out the rights and wrongs and the facts. The simple truth is that since 2010, the Government have chosen to double the fees charged in respect of these children. They have gone up from around £370 to north of £1,000. That has happened in the context of the hostile environment, which has been infamous in recent weeks and months. The increase is clearly designed to discourage people from coming to this country or registering as British citizens. Unfortunately, an element of profiteering has come about as a result. It is entirely unjustifiable that the Government should seek to make profits from the immigration system, and in particular from children passing through our immigration system, in this fashion. The net result is that we have perhaps as many as 60,000 children—I agree with Members that we should know precisely how many children are engaged in the process—placed in limbo.

Why does it matter that these children are unable to secure the British citizenship that is their right? We need look no further than the Windrush scandal to see that it is vital that the right documentation is in place so that the British citizenship these children are entitled to is secured for them. While it may be true, as the Prime Minister has said on a number of occasions in responding to criticism on this issue, that access to benefits and other aspects of our social security system will be afforded to these children if they have indefinite leave to remain, who is to say, looking back at how the Windrush scandal unfolded, that that will necessarily be the case in future? Who is to say that there will not be renewed hostile environments under any future Government? If these children do not go through the process of securing British citizenship, they may well find themselves in the awful, invidious position in which British citizens have found themselves following the Windrush scandal, where they are denied access to their rights and are potentially deported from this country because they do not have the right papers.

For all those reasons, I hope the Minister has listened to the heartfelt and sincerely held views of Members from all parts of the House on the wrongness of profiteering from children and of simply assuming that indefinite leave to remain is good enough for these British citizens. In responding, I hope she will recognise that this is another Windrush scandal in the making, unless something is done about it. The right thing to do is very simple: we should waive fees for children in the care system; we should have a system that allows fees to be exempted for carers or parents who are unable to afford the fees; and we should not be charging exorbitant fees. It is entirely legitimate for there to be some administrative charge, as happens in other countries around the world, but we have clearly gone far too far. We are clearly gouging profits from children who by right should be British citizens. I think that is a pretty simple argument, and I hope the Minister can respond to it positively.