Citizenship

My Lords, we, too, are grateful to the Minister for repeating the Statement from another place. We are delighted to welcome the renewal of the undertaking to consolidate the law on immigration, as the Statement makes clear. We ask the noble Lord whether that will also cover citizenship. The law on citizenship has not been consolidated since 1981, so it is in almost as much disarray as the law on immigration. It would be useful to know whether the two will be handled together. In view of the range and complexity of these proposals, we ask the Government to allow more than the usual 16 weeks of consultation on the Green Paper. Some of the proposals are presented for the first time. During the consultations that led to the Green Paper, which are referred to in the Statement, there was no mention of probationary citizenship. This is a new concept, which has not yet been tried out on the public. We deplore the fact that the Government are proposing in a totally unexpected way to increase the fees being charged to people who are already in the country. I do not believe that that was ever foreshadowed. The noble Lord may not remember—I do not think that he was here at the time—but we objected strenuously to the enormous increases imposed on applicants for various services from the immigration authorities, particularly the vast increase that was imposed on people applying for indefinite leave to remain. It means that, from start to finish, we are charging more than any other country for a person coming here and obtaining permanent leave to stay. I sent the noble Lord’s predecessor a comparison showing that we are second to none in the enormity of the charges that we impose on potential migrants. Like the noble Baroness, we foresee problems arising with the community service requirements, which could entail a massive bureaucracy in authenticating the work that people do under these schemes and in validating the qualification that it gives them to be treated as accelerated applicants for citizenship. We are also concerned about the language test. If it is applied across the board, it will discriminate against older people, who might find it impossible to learn English. If I suddenly had to go and live in Pakistan and I was made to learn Urdu, I think that I might have some difficulties. Does not the noble Lord agree that this requirement should be applied flexibly, with regard to the age of the applicant as well as to his mental ability? There may well be people coming to live here who, for one reason or another, are not as intellectually able to learn languages as others are, so they would never reach the point at which they can pass the language test. On the probationary period, we agree that a lot of questions need to be sorted out. For example, presumably the benefits and services for persons granted refugee status will be suspended once their application for asylum has been granted. They will come off National Asylum Support Service support, so what kind of help will they be able to get from the public purse if they are not immediately able to find jobs and contribute to the economy as we hope that they will be able to do in the end? We should have some flexibility in this requirement, because not everyone is immediately able to enter the job market successfully when otherwise they are qualified for leave to remain in this country. Also, how will the acquisition of probationary citizenship affect people whose original nationality, because of a prohibition on dual nationality, does not allow them to obtain another citizenship? Will they lose their original citizenship? Have other states been consulted about how they will treat probationary citizenship when looking at the question of dual nationality? I have given the Minister notice of these two questions. First, will he confirm that discrimination against children born abroad to British mothers and foreign fathers is to be removed, as we have attempted to ensure under previous legislation and were finally promised during the proceedings on the UK Borders Bill? Secondly, since both Indian and Nepali law do not allow a person to hold their citizenship if he is a citizen of any other state, will British nationals overseas of Indian and Nepali descent from Hong Kong who have no other citizenship now be entitled to claim full British citizenship?