Immigration and Nationality Application Fees

Steve McCabe Excerpts

Thursday 25th March 2021 Westminster Hall

[Steve McCabe (in the Chair)]

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[Meg Hillier (Hackney South and Shoreditch) (Lab/Co-op)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered immigration and nationality application fees.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr McCabe. I have an important issue to highlight today about an injustice that has long been a concern of mine in my constituency. I am pleased to see so many Members in attendance. Many more offered support for the debate, which I thank the Backbench Business Committee for granting.

This issue has a big impact on a relatively small number of people. There is a wider issue about the fees for immigration and citizenship, but I will focus on particular on young people who were not born in the UK but arrived as children and for whom this is their only home. I am aware of the interest in the debate and know that cross-party colleagues from around the House will have more specific issues to raise, so I will not take too much of their time.

We have seen a pattern in the increase in fees and the route to citizenship that is having a detrimental effect on many of my constituents. It affects adults and young people who arrive in the UK and seek to become citizens. Whatever our politics or our party, I think we all agree that we should be proud that people want to become citizens of the United Kingdom and seek to get a British passport, but for young people in particular the route to citizenship is having a big impact and depriving them of fulfilling their full role in British society.

Let me give a bit of history. I have been the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch for nearly 16 years, and when I was first elected somebody could apply for one leave to remain application that would last for five years, and after five years they could apply for citizenship, so they would pay two fees. It moved to applying for three years at a time, so two applications were needed to get to the five years. Now, people have to apply at least three times: that would get them to five years, but those on the 10-year route to citizenship must apply multiple times.

The fees have also gone up individually. For a registration of a child as a British citizen, in April 2011—six years after I was elected—it was £540 and this year it is expected to be £1,012. For indefinite leave to remain for main applicants and children, in 2011 it was £972 for the main applicant—typically the head of the household—and in 2021 it is £2,389 for the main applicant and for dependents, too. Dependents used to be about half the price of a main applicant. When we look at the combined impact of the fees, we see it is incredibly expensive. It adds up typically to more than £10,000 for somebody to apply.

It is important to touch on the implications for the Government vision for a global Britain as part of an international community where we attract talent. We know in the past we have had challenges attracting people to universities in this country. English-speaking countries such as Canada and Australia advertised in other countries’ newspapers for people to apply to them, saying that their fees are cheaper. So there is a direct impact on the Government’s own policies.

It is impossible to compare fees completely across countries, but I will give a couple of examples. In Ireland, the naturalisation fees for adults or children is €175, or roughly £150. Denmark has a standard naturalisation fee of 3,800 krone, or roughly £438—forgive me if my exchange rates are a few days out. In Canada, the fee for adult citizenship applications is roughly £306. We are looking at a very different scale, and that is alongside the hoops that people have to go through.

Let me just do a little bit of maths for the Minister and add up some of the costs. Let us not forget that we have to add the immigration surcharge, now £400 per person per year. For an application for two and a half years’ leave to remain, that adds £1,000 on top. That increased in October last year to £624 per person per year, or £470 for applicants under 18. That is £1,560 for an adult applying for two and a half years’ leave to remain. We have to remember that two and a half years’ leave to remain gets someone just two and a half years’ leave to remain. Before that ends, they have to be putting in the fees and the application for the next process. Barely has a household got over the cost of paying these fees than it has to start saving up for the next application.

Over a 10-year period of qualifying residence, if the fees do not change, the overall cost would be, for a single adult, £10,372 and for a family of four, £38,408. I highlight the family of four figure, because I am talking particularly of people in my constituency who are affected, who arrived here as children and for whom this is the country they know, the country in which they have been to school and the country that they love.

The Greater London Authority estimates that around 330,000 children and young people have precarious citizenship status. That does not mean that they are all on the route to citizenship. Relative to the Minister’s overall workload, only a small number of people are affected, if we look at just young people—because it will be a subset of that group—but it is a very significant group in terms of what they could deliver to the UK.

We have had some recent announcements on the Government’s proposals on entrepreneurial visas. I represent Shoreditch, so I know all about the tech visas and the entrepreneurial visas. For the global talent visa, for example, the application fee is £152 for the main applicant, though it can rise to £456 in certain circumstances. Even an extension of that is only £608. An innovator visa is just over £1,000 and a 10-year private family grounds visa is £1,033 per person for the main applicant or a dependant.

The difference is extraordinary; it is tenfold. That makes it very unfair, because the people I am talking about have grown up in the UK, they have been educated in the UK and they want to stay in the UK. They have no other country that is home. They may have parents who come from another country and they may have been born in another country, but that is not their home. They feel part of British society. We are making them a second-class part of British society by putting these fee barriers in their path.

For many families, if they have the choice between having the main breadwinner become a citizen, or the rest of the family, the choice will be straightforward. They make just one member of the family a citizen and the others do not qualify for it without paying the fees. For the young people I am talking about, they often do not realise until they are 18 and they would like to go to university—I pay tribute to We Belong, an organisation that is partly the brainchild of my constituent, Chrisann Jarrett. Suddenly, on top of those fees that they have not been able to pay, they are faced with international student fees. They want to be full, contributing members of British society; in fact, they want to be British citizens, but they are priced out. At the same time as we are encouraging entrepreneurs and innovators to come in on cheaper visas to contribute to the wealth of our country, we have a wealth of talent already here that is keen, willing and able to contribute. For these children and young people, the UK is home. They are not going to go anywhere else and they want to contribute.

As the Children’s Society recognises, about half of children with foreign-born parents live in poverty. These are not wealthy families necessarily; I will say clearly, though, that in my experience there is no poverty of ambition. These are working households, but the fees are out of reach of anyone on a low, average or even rather good wage, so I think it is time that the Home Office looked at this.

The Government have made great play of leaving the European Union. They have made announcements recently about Britain’s place in the world and global Britain. They need now to follow up with actions and support these young world citizens who want to become British citizens; they are living in our communities now and are keen to contribute. I hope that the Minister will give us a full answer on the justification for these citizenship fees, and a hint that the Government are considering a change of direction.

[Steve McCabe (in the Chair)]

To accommodate everyone on the call list, I am imposing a four-and-a-half-minute limit on Back-Bench contributions.

--- Later in debate ---

[Alison Thewliss (Glasgow Central) (SNP) [V]]

I am glad to be able to raise some of my constituents’ concerns in this debate. The Home Office’s route to citizenship really does treat people as cash cows. It is blatant profiteering off the backs of people who have come to this country to help and to contribute, and it has a negative impact on families’ health and wellbeing, pushing them into debt. The 10-year path to application for ILR, as people have pointed out, means fees every 30 months, the immigration health surcharge, and the ILR application itself after all that. As the House of Commons Library points out, that totals £10,372 in fees and an additional £2,389 for ILR.

Of course, that amount assumes that everything is simple and straightforward, which we know often is not. For example, it does not include lawyers’ fees which, although perhaps necessary, can be absolutely eye-watering for families. I know from people in my constituency that the costs mount up, particularly for families with more than one child. As the hon. Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) rightly pointed out, this means that families prioritise those who are working and leave children to a later stage. Other families who cannot make those choices end up in a huge amount of debt, sometimes even putting these fees on credit cards, leading to significant financial problems for many.

They cannot live the life that the rest of us can enjoy. Many children cannot then participate in school trips, for example, because they do not have the right to travel due to not having citizenship or the relevant passport to do so. They lose out because their families are putting so much into the immigration system that they cannot afford the basics that many other families enjoy. The fee waiver, as others have pointed out and which the Minister may fall back on, is incredibly difficult to get. I have tried to support constituents to get a fee waiver, but it often proves almost impossible unless the family were absolutely destitute. That should not be something that a family has to prove just for the privilege of living in and being a citizen of this country.

As other Members have pointed out, the system itself is incredibly poor. Many cases are lengthy and the processes are inefficient. Many of my constituents have waited years and years to be processed due to issues that the Home Office deems “complex” while often being unwilling or unable to discuss with me as the MP. I could speak at length as well about the visitor visa process, which is absolutely appalling. It just takes money from people, only to refuse their application and then grant it later down the line despite nothing much having changed.

To move to the highly-skilled migrants, I was aghast and shocked to find the Chancellor bigging up the chances of bringing in highly-skilled migrants to this country in his Budget, because I have dealt with many of the highly-skilled migrants affected by the 322(5) case and who found themselves suddenly losing out. Many of them, who were at the end of the 10-year route to ILR and had paid their fees and taxes over the years, lost out because they had made legitimate changes that anyone could make to their tax returns. That meant that their route to citizenship was torn away from them completely unjustifiably by the Home Office, and many people are still in this situation waiting for justice.

Many of these people have been here contributing for a decade or more, but the Home Office then treats them like criminals in the country they have made their home. To use the phrase from 322(5) in the immigration rules, they were deemed

“a threat to national security”

and all for making a legitimate change to their tax return. It is absolutely shocking and unacceptable, and before a single further person is given a highly-skilled migrant visa, I ask the Chancellor and the Home Office to sort out this injustice once and for all. It cannot be that those who are already here and have already contributed are treated so abysmally while the Chancellor tries with the other hand to bring people into this country.

I could speak at length about the many cases I have seen over the past six years showing how incompetent, expensive, inefficient and cruel the Home Office is, but I ask the Minister to reflect on these issues that I have raised and make it fairer for families who just want to live their lives, get on with things and have their children grow up in this country. We should owe them a great debt of thanks, not put a great debt on their shoulders.

[Steve McCabe (in the Chair)]

Last but not least, Mr Alistair Carmichael.

--- Later in debate ---

[Holly Lynch (Halifax) (Lab) [V]]

It is a pleasure, as always, to serve under your chairmanship, Mr McCabe. I join others in congratulating my hon. Friend the Member for Hackney South and Shoreditch (Meg Hillier) on securing this important debate and opening the contributions.

My hon. Friend did an excellent job in setting out the different fees, their cumulative effect and how they make us one of the least competitive countries in the world if we want to attract the brightest and the best, even through options like the global talent visa. She has enjoyed a great deal of cross-party support this afternoon.

I begin by reflecting on how immigration and nationality fees have increased over the past 10 years. Others have paid tribute to the wonderful organisation We Belong, which is led by young people who have made the UK their home. They are right to say that the cost of leave to remain for those who came to UK, which was a focus of my hon. Friend’s opening speech, has increased by 331% in the past six years alone. Just imagine if the same could be said about nurses’ pay, as my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne) said.

The 10-year route to permanent settlement through leave to remain requires five applications totalling £12,771 per person. That statistic is made even more staggering when we consider that it costs the Government just £142 to process those applications. The fact that the Government seek to make a profit from people who grew up in this country and who simply want to establish a future here in the UK is unacceptable. It denies them the security and certainty that they deserve. My hon. Friend the Member for Bradford East (Imran Hussain) is quite right when he says that the fees paid are not reflected in the experience that people have in their service from the Home Office.

As my hon. Friends the Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Tahir Ali) and for Bradford East, and the hon. Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald), have already said, the Court of Appeal found that the requirement for children who are entitled to be registered as British citizens to pay a fee of £1,012 fails to take into consideration the children’s best interests. The Government have yet to respond to this decision, and therefore I call on the Minister urgently to reconsider this issue when they respond to those concerns. Once again, it is disappointing that it has fallen to the courts to pull up the Government with a judgment that said the fee would leave children feeling “alienated, excluded, isolated” and “second-best,” when instead some compassion and common sense would go a long way.

Others have raised the challenges facing this country as a consequence of the pandemic. Immigration fees are a significant barrier to many migrant and overseas healthcare workers, as has been highlighted during the last year. I found myself unexpectedly cheering the contribution from the hon. Member for Delyn (Rob Roberts) when he said that NHS workers should not be in debt to pay their fees and that we are the ones who should be indebted to them.

My hon. Friend the Member for Mitcham and Morden (Siobhain McDonagh) gave a heartbreaking speech about the contribution of her local migrant healthcare workers, which reflects the fact that 169,000 or 13.8% of NHS staff reported a non-British nationality in January last year. Migrant workers currently make up 16% of our social care workforce. Many of those workers face the psychological and financial burden of immigration application fees. I believe the pandemic has made us all recognise beyond any doubt that we absolutely need these people—there’s no two ways about it.

We welcome the decision to extend the visas of doctors, nurses and paramedics that were due to expire before October and then March, even though that second extension came late in the day. It has been a battle to ensure that those extensions recognise all those that they should. We were also delighted that the Government listened to our calls to offer an exemption from the immigration health surcharge to those working in healthcare, even though the delivery of that has been far from as simple as it could have been, with many still waiting for refunds. As the Minister will remember, we were keen to stress during the passing of the Bill that became the Immigration Act 2020 that it is not that we are doing those workers a favour by extending their visas; they are doing us a massive favour, by staying and working on our frontline.

How else can we recognise that contribution? In addition to the fees paid by individuals, the Minister will also remember that we called on the Government to rethink the immigration skills charge for NHS trusts, which is a fee paid by hospitals back to the Government; they often face no choice other than to recruit from overseas for specialist clinical skills, because we have failed to train staff domestically. My local hospital trust, which runs Calderdale Royal Hospital and Huddersfield Royal Infirmary, paid nearly £163,000 back to Government in the 2019-20 financial year alone. That money could have been better spent on services and improving health outcomes. We are aware of at least three trusts that have paid out over £1 million since 2017, with Portsmouth Hospitals NHS Trust paying £2.7 million since 2017. I urge the Minister to reflect on that, as it surely does not make any sense.

The Select Committee on Home Affairs has repeatedly pushed for the free visa extension to be applied to care workers and low-paid NHS staff in non-medical roles, which we fully support, and it has recommended British citizenship or permanent residency be granted to health and social care workers with short-term visas. We have an obligation to acknowledge the sacrifices that migrant workers have made during the pandemic, and removing the fees would be a great start. Research undertaken by the liberal conservative think-tank Bright Blue suggests that 60% of the public think it is important for immigrants living permanently in the UK to become citizens, and 75% think it would be cheaper for certain migrant groups to become citizens. We know there is a broad appetite among the general public to make citizenship more accessible, and fees are certainly one of the biggest barriers.

My constituents in Halifax know from personal experience that the measures introduced by the Government are falling drastically short. My office and I have been supporting a young woman who is a single parent and who works in social care, caring for adults with learning disabilities. She paid to extend her visa in September 2020 and had to pay over £1,000 for the immigration health surcharge. As a direct result of that payment, she is struggling financially, to the extent that we had to refer her to local food banks. We contacted the Home Office to seek clarification as to when she could expect a refund. However, I am afraid to say it has been utterly non-committal. We still have no information as to when she will receive that back. Given the pressures that my constituent has faced over the last year during this pandemic, it is deeply distressing to hear how our immigration fees threaten to leave her without even the most basic essentials. My hon. Friend the Member for Edmonton (Kate Osamor) shared similarly powerful stories from her constituency, about how she feels that both the fees and the solicitor fees are pushing constituents into poverty and destitution.

The Doctors’ Association UK has pointed out:

“We entered this pandemic severely short-staffed, with over 10,000 vacancies for doctors, and 100,000 for nurses.”

An immigration policy that acknowledges that reality, and seeks to fix it with an accessible and affordable process that is fit for purpose, is now required from the Government.

Hon. Members will recognise from their casework that the examples I have mentioned are not uncommon, but I want to turn to the really worrying contrast reported in both The Guardian and the Financial Times recently, which relates to the investigation into the conduct of a Home Office official dating back to 2016. I have written to the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Croydon South (Chris Philp), about this issue, but sources have claimed, and the Home Office has confirmed, that a senior caseworker who works on nationality applications at the Home Office was investigated by the Department’s anti-corruption unit for allegedly being paid to offer external advice to one of the UK’s largest law firms, Mishcon de Reya. Allegations also include the release of unauthorised information regarding citizenship applications. The official was taken to dinner, and gifts, including champagne, were sent to him and at least one other colleague.

I have asked for that investigation to be published, but the Minister for Crime and Policing said this week that that would not be possible. In his answer to my written question, the Minister present today also confirmed to me this week that:

“Per the Civil Service Code, Civil Servants must not accept gifts or hospitality or receive other benefits from anyone which might reasonably be seen to compromise their personal judgement or integrity.”

In its response to The Guardian newspaper, Mishcon de Reya said:

“There is nothing unusual or inappropriate about this common industry practice.”

Mishcon de Reya was aware that other law firms had similar professional relationships with the official in question. Given that we know gifts were sent to other Home Office officials, I would welcome some clear answers from the Minister. Do we know who else received gifts, and were these returned? How would he respond to the suggestion that such conduct is common industry practice? Those are questions that must be answered, and some transparency is absolutely essential.

Frankly, the news of this scandal comes as an insult to my constituents who cannot afford that level of access to officials via their lawyers, and who are struggling to make ends meet in paying the fees required. We need assurances from the Home Office that the UK immigration system is not one that works only for those who can afford to make it work for them. Over the last decade immigration and nationality application fees have risen beyond what is reasonable, often trapping people into paying fees that are beyond their means for years, just to have the security of staying where they are. My hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes) made very clear the consequences for children, in particular, as they grow up in this country.

I know the Minister will recognise the deeply unfair contrast I have set out between those who can afford top lawyers and what would appear to be the enhanced access that comes with that, and those who cannot. We need a fairer system that recognises the contributions made by migrant workers, many of whom work in our local healthcare and who are a precious resource that we just cannot afford to be without.

[Steve McCabe (in the Chair)]

I was just checking that that was an ending and not a break in the transmission. My apologies. I call the Minister, Kevin Foster.