Nationality and Borders Bill

Steven Bonnar Excerpts

2nd reading
Tuesday 20th July 2021 Commons Chamber

[Steven Bonnar (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)]

Disturbing, dysfunctional and destructive—three of the most commonly used words by my constituents in their correspondence to me when discussing this anti-refugee Bill. To my mind, the Bill is nothing more than a ploy by this consistently callous Tory Government to take a sledgehammer to a 60-year-old treaty, the only global legal instrument that there is to deal with the protection and rights of refugees. This UK Government are torching their international human rights obligations under the 1951 UN refugee convention. We as representatives in this place are in very real danger of assisting in the committing of crimes against humanity by turning our backs on those in need of safety and on how this Bill will criminalise these people. History will shame us all in every essence. That is why I oppose the Bill in the name of the people of Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill.

This legislation will be nothing short of a punishment to those fleeing war, persecution and human rights atrocities. It will create an asylum system that undermines international law and will cost the already failing Home Office vast amounts of time and money. This legislation, despite the Government’s promises to increase safe and legal routes for people urgently requiring refuge around the world, will contain no such commitments whatsoever. The Tories have actually boasted that this Bill will create a “global Britain”, able to act as a force for good; instead, this is a cruel, callous piece of legislation that fails in both practical and moral terms and reneges on our international responsibilities.

The Bill will cause misery to thousands of people, leaving behind what is already a toxic legacy for this Home Secretary, and will introduce a further embedding of a racist, hostile, xenophobic environment for us all to contend with in our daily lives as it leaks from this place into our society. This anti-refugee Bill will not solve any of its real problems, which have been caused not by the comparatively small number of people who do seek asylum but by decades of Governments in this place and their complete mismanagement. Successive UK Governments of any hue have failed time and again to operate an effective and efficient asylum system, fundamentally failing to deliver timely and high-quality decision making. Nothing in the Bill will make the necessary improvements. Instead, taken together, the Bill’s provisions will slow the process down, increase delays, increase destitution and mental illness, and cost the purse and, more importantly, the people of these countries much, much more while it destroys lives and relationships with our global partners.

Many asylum seekers have lived through dreadful experiences and faced devastating loss. The Home Office’s plans will only add to that trauma. Asylum claims in the UK are falling and are at historically low levels, with a 24% drop in the last year alone, yet the Home Office is pandering to scare stories and myths from the far right with the introduction of this Bill. As a result, this legislation will not only seek to criminalise asylum seekers, but create more bureaucracy and a bigger work load for officials, lengthening an already delayed process and trapping people further in limbo for years to come. There has been no real attempt to engage with experts on this approach. Almost 200 organisations have criticised the consultation associated with this Bill, framing it as a “sham” with a premeditated outcome. I could not agree in any stronger terms.

A message from his eminence Pope Francis that we all received for the forthcoming World Day of Migrants and Refugees stated:

“We are all in the same boat and called to work together so that there will be no more walls that separate us, no longer others, but only a single ‘we’, encompassing all of humanity”—

a vision that could not be further from this Tory Government’s agenda.



The UK once had a long history, they say, of welcoming people escaping conflict, poverty, oppression and natural disaster. That tradition should have been protected under any new legislation, recognising the interconnectedness of our global family, and cognisant of the colonial past of this place’s empires. The Home Secretary’s plans to send asylum seekers thousands of miles away, to be processed in third-world countries, are both insane and inhumane. The idea that asylum seekers can simply be shipped off somewhere else while those claims are assessed, is frankly a fantasy. Asylum seekers are people. They are human beings, not packages to be disposed of.

The UK needs only to look at Australia’s experience to learn that overseas processing centres for asylum seekers cause incredible psychological damage. They are eye-wateringly expensive, and they do nothing to deter asylum seekers. It could not be clearer: the Home Secretary is deliberately misinterpreting international law to pander to her own political base. That cannot be denied. The idea that the system is broken for some unknown structural reason is complete and utter nonsense. After 11 years in power, the responsibility for that lies firmly with this Conservative Government. The Bill will do nothing to fix things. It will only make a rotten system worse.

Nationality and Borders Bill

Steven Bonnar Excerpts

Report stage
Tuesday 7th December 2021 Commons Chamber

[Anne McLaughlin (Glasgow North East) (SNP)]

Even though the Scottish National party has fundamental disagreements with most of this horrific Bill, that is not the case for part 1, where we are in agreement with much of it. We support the efforts to correct some historical injustices of UK nationality law and bringing British citizenship and British overseas territories citizenship law back into line. It should have happened a long time ago, but we support that it is happening now. We pay tribute to the campaign groups that have continued to make the case over several years, including the Project for the Registration of Children as British Citizens, and Amnesty International. However, there are a number of issues that I want to raise and I will start with the SNP’s new clauses.

New clause 34 would ensure that the Government do not profit from people registering as British citizens or British overseas citizens. Hon. Members might be interested to know that, in 2018, the Home Office made profits of £500 million by charging £500 million more than it cost to process applications. The cost to the Home Office of the registration process is about £372 a person, but to the person applying, it is a minimum of £1,100 for children and £1,200 for an adult. Why? More importantly, why does that matter? How does that affect someone’s life?

I would like to share a story that I told in Committee of someone who has become part of my family and the devastating impact that the extortionate fees had on his family life. Cambull—that is not his real name—came from Sudan. The village where he grew up was razed to the ground, everybody fled, and he did not know where the rest of his family were. He assumed that his brothers, sister, mother and father had died, but he did not know for sure. He kept hearing rumours over the years. He came here as an asylum seeker and got his refugee status. He worked in security on minimum wage, zero-hours contracts, but he had a diligent approach to his job and built a life for himself. But the need to know for sure what had happened to his family members was always in the back of his mind. Any of us would share that need.

The Red Cross got some information for Cambull. There was a possibility that some of his family had survived, but nothing was certain. He needed to go back to find out if that was the case. To do that, he needed the protection of a British passport and British citizenship, so he set about applying. Because he was on the minimum wage, it took him years to save up the fees. I realise there are many in here who cannot imagine that, and I make no criticism of them—I am not being facetious—for never having experienced poverty. I would like nobody to experience it, but I would urge Conservative Members to trust me when I say that it took him years to save up the £1,200, and he could not have saved any harder. Had he been charged what it actually cost the Home Office, he would have got to Sudan a whole lot sooner. I know that nobody in this Chamber would have wanted what happened to him to have happened—I am coming to that—but I want to explain the impact of these extortionate fees in the hope that the Government can be persuaded to reduce them.

It took Cambull a long time, but he did finally get back to Sudan, with his British passport, to see what had become of his family, and he discovered that his mum had, in fact, survived the brutal attacks. She later became ill, and was ill for many years, but she lived longer than anyone expected because she had clung on hoping she would see his face one more time. She died two months before he got there. As I have said, I am not for a second suggesting that anybody here or anybody drafting the legislation would not care about what happened to Cambull, but if he had been able to apply for his citizenship when he became eligible—in other words, if he had been able to afford the cost because it was the actual cost, rather than the cost plus profit—he could have been reunited with his mum before she passed away, and it would have meant so much to both of them. There are so many Cambulls out there and others with different stories.

I want to express my party’s support for new clause 8 in the name of the hon. Member for Streatham (Bell Ribeiro-Addy). I will leave her to make what I know will be very good arguments about the even more offensive practice of making profit from children’s applications. One of those arguments is of course that the courts have already ruled against it, but that does not seem to make a difference to this Government these days.

Finally, on awareness raising in relation to new clause 34, several organisations, including Amnesty, have expressed concern about the lack of it. They have asked for assurances that where an individual application is successful, the Government will take positive action to ensure that other potential applicants are made aware of their equal or similar right to register at discretion. This means that where an example is identified, as the Bill says, of

“unfairness,…an act or omission of a public authority, or…exceptional circumstances”,

on which it is right or necessary to exercise the discretion, there should be publicity and awareness raising. We talked about that in Committee, but those organisations want to know that it will happen, and that members of the public who could use the legislation to the same positive effect will have access—easy access—to such information. I would also like an assurance from the Minister that awareness raising will apply equally to British citizenship and British overseas territories citizenship.

On new clause 33, EU citizens have been living in the UK without knowing that, for some, there is an obscure requirement to hold a form of private health insurance. With free access at the point of need to our unique NHS, of which we are all proud, the EU rules on the need for comprehensive sickness insurance were not really written with the UK’s unusual situation in mind. New clause 33 is necessary because, for many, this requirement has only become apparent when applying for citizenship or when applying for British passports for their children born in the UK, and it is now presenting significant hurdles to obtaining citizenship. It could easily be rectified by this new clause, which would allow an applicant the right of free access to the NHS to satisfy the requirement that an individual should hold CSI.

The Minister—the Under-Secretary of State for the Home Department, the hon. Member for Corby (Tom Pursglove)—made sympathetic noises on this in Committee, so if he will not accept this new clause, will he at least tighten up the guidance so that nobody has to take the risk of shelling out over £1,200 to apply, only to lose it when the decision maker takes the view on CSI that the Minister seemed to be suggesting he would not want them to take?

We support many of the amendments and new clauses, but I will mention just a couple in particular. Amendment 2 in the name of the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) would leave out clause 10 on statelessness. Clause 10 requires the Secretary of State to be satisfied that a child was unable to acquire another nationality before being permitted to register as a British citizen. This creates an additional and unjustified hurdle to stateless children’s registration as British citizens. Rather than ease the process and reform the current system to help children attain citizenship, the Government are intent on putting up more barriers and making it more difficult for children under 18 to be registered. Why? Because they have a handful of anecdotal examples of parents who appear to be using the system, as far as they are concerned, to jump the queue.

In fact, I remember only one such anecdote in Committee. However, I do remember hon. Members on the Committee asking repeatedly for evidence, and the Minister stated repeatedly that evidence would be forthcoming. I remember that the hon. Member for Enfield, Southgate (Bambos Charalambous) asked, I asked several times, the hon. Member for Bermondsey and Old Southwark (Neil Coyle) asked and my hon. Friend the Member for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch East (Stuart C. McDonald) asked. When I looked at the record, I counted at least 10 times that we asked for something more than anecdotes, and we were told that the evidence would be forthcoming, but it just has not been, so perhaps the Minister is going to surprise us and give us the evidence now.

The impact of the anecdotes—or the one anecdote I remember being given—was that a child who has done nothing wrong may end up registered as British five years before they otherwise might be. That hardly seems grounds for introducing this restrictive clause. The impact of statelessness on children can be dreadful. It is a terrible thing for a child to feel that they do not belong during their formative years.

I come now to amendment 12 in name of the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis). We are very much opposed to clause 9, which, as we have heard, grants the Home Secretary the power to strip UK nationals of their citizenship in secret and without advance warning. This is deeply concerning, and it sends completely the wrong message. Since this has become public knowledge, I have had a number of people phoning me about it in an absolute panic.

[Steven Bonnar (Coatbridge, Chryston and Bellshill) (SNP)]

Does my hon. Friend agree with me that it is not only us and the right hon. Member for Haltemprice and Howden (Mr Davis) who share these concerns? A petition that was started on change.org by my constituent Mr Kashif Iqbal has now got over 150,000 signatures calling for the removal of clause 9 to ensure that British citizenship cannot be stripped from our constituents in this manner.

[Anne McLaughlin]

I am coming to the end, Madam Deputy Speaker, but I pay tribute to Mr Iqbal, my hon. Friend’s constituent, because that is what we want. We want public pressure, and in Committee I felt that we were not being listened to at all. Of course, we did not win any of the battles in Committee and we are probably not going to win any of the battles here, but we will try, and public pressure is what will make this Government change their mind.

As I have said, we do support many of the amendments—for example, new clause 2 on Chagos islanders, and I pay tribute to the hon. Member for Crawley (Henry Smith) for his tenacity on that. We support new clauses 4 and 5 on Hong Kong citizens, new clause 7 on health care workers—it seems a bit of a cheek to be charging people for the privilege of putting themselves at risk fighting the pandemic—and those amendments and new clauses from the Joint Committee on Human Rights. As I say, we support righting the historical wrongs, but our primary concerns are stateless children, stripping away people’s nationality without notice, the CSI requirement for EEA citizens, and the need to end the practice of profiteering from people registering as British citizens—that has to stop.